Well where do I start with this one? Enough to say my time with Bluewave has finished and I'll not be having anything more to do with them.
The variation in service for the first week was enormous, ranging from 0.5Mb to 35Mb downloads depending on the time of day. But to be in with a realistic chance of 30Mb+ you needed to be using it after midnight. A daytime average I suppose was in the region of 15Mb. I raised a high priority support ticket about the slow speeds (when it hit less than 1Mb, 20th March) but to this day it hasn't received a reply. Check out this bad boy:-
http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/3384379640
Then the service stopped altogether, engineers visited and replaced the dish and moved its location. It always had a perfect line of sight to the antenna. On testing with the engineers there and seeing a mighty 6Mb download I was advised it will take a while to optimise. Fair enough. It never did "optimise".
What followed was a connection that was fast enough when nobody else used their connection but at the times of the day when you needed it was extremely up and down. Pings ranging from 40ms to 190ms. Downloads from 2Mb to 20Mb. Trying to watch any type of streaming on a weekend evening was impossible. Of course these connections have a contention ration of 50:1, the same as everybody else but the variation in performance is extreme to say the least.
I tried and tried to get some answers, resorting to e-mailing the boss directly and then when the speedtests proved the point being passed on to somebody else, but with days between responses in the end I gave up and called it a day. What says it all to me is being asked to provide Speedtest results, providing them and then being told that Speedtests aren't an accurate measure of their network. Whilst at the same time they use Speedtest results on their Facebook page to market their service. I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions on that one. :)
From a purely technical side of things I've used a lot of 50:1 contention ratio internet connections in my time but I've never used one as bad for fluctuation in performance as Bluewave.
Overall 3/10 unless you're a house wife that only uses the internet for Facebook because then it's probably greeeaaatttt.
