Primus WiMax – First Impressions
A few weeks ago I received a little flyer (despite my “No Junk Mail” sign — *sigh*) about Primus’ WiMax trial. I signed up — and hey, they sent me the package to try. I asked for a PCMCIA card for my laptop, and that’s what I got — after all, with bandwidth advertised at 1Mbit, its only redeeming feature is portability.
It was easy enough to install, other than the usual WindowsXP reset-after-every-driver-is-installed bit, and connected like a charm from my apartment. I poked around on the web briefly and was annoyed to discover that the connection would drop and reconnect every few minutes. Very VERY frustrating — I had similar problems with my old WiFi router and ditched it because of that.
When I could get a connection to stay for long enough, the speed was rated at about 300 kbps up and down. Faster than my cell phone connecting via Rogers’ wireless network, but not much (although cheaper — right now, at least!)
So overall a disappointing experience. I could probably tolerate it for minimal web browsing & e-mail checking — but I can already do that with my cell phone & PDA, anywhere in the Rogers service area (which is much bigger than the city of Hamilton) and without carrying my laptop around. Primus will have to do a lot better if they expect anyone to pay for this service.
I’ll have to try it in other points of the city… more to come.
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