What is the fastest speed any wireless Internet can provide? What is the farthest distance wireless Internet broadcast to? Does speed drop off due to distance?

Tom

Welllllll. Kind of difficult. You won't get near to limit let me say that to start.

Wireless has a theoretical limit that is fairly well known if you use wifi. The current 802.11ac maybe now the new 802.11ad would be the fastest.

Most of the Texas based line of sight companies offer speed limits somewhat close to satellite speeds. The line of sight is a dedicated antenna to their transmitter. Used to be bandwidth dedicated to a type of tv system.

The satellite based ones have speed claims you can view.

There may be some laser based systems out there that could be the fastest but would suffer under many conditions and would be a very limited use system.

There are some commercial point to point that could be set up to include a sort of parallel transmission to increase the speeds.

Now as to the farthest. That could be light years away.

In every case I know of, distance will reduce speeds.


What are you trying to do?

When considering a wireless ISP, what questions should be asked?

My brother lives in the country and has one of those line-of-sight wireless ISPs (he uses Dish for TV). The speeds he gets are similar to DSL. To use his words, that hamster don't run very hard.

I suspect your best way to research this is to do a web search for the ISPs in your area. Just take any user reviews with several grains of salt.

I think the primary question to ask would relate to uptime. In my brother's area, which is heavily wooded, there are thunderstorms which can result in fallen trees that knock down power lines that lead to power outages that take down the towers. A couple of times, he's lost connection for a couple of days.

Price, rental on hardware, speeds to include minimum and effect of external issues, maybe security and how much will it cost for them to install it. When I looked it wasn't very impressive price versus performance.

You'd have to be in one of only a few locations in Austin area to get that service.

You may be better off using T-mobile with a 4G lte modem until they get 5G going (if ever)

Might be possible to get a gizmo to access a nearby hotspot.

I assume your wanting to know about wireless internet where you install an antenna on your roof that connects to a radio tower within line of site of your house.

In my area there are several wireless ISPs which offer similar max download speeds of about 25 mbps. Distance and weather especially rain affects speed. Not sure what the max distance is because it depends on the technology used and the amount of stuff between you and the ISP tower. Anywhere from 2 to 30 miles.