I had USI Wireless for a while. The secure connection is the way to go. The public connections are for their limited free access. I used a laptop and monitored the signal strength to find the best location. Never found anything strong enough to keep a good connection. After I dropped their service, they called and highly recommended their $49 professional installation to solve my signal strength problem. According to others I talked to, this included mounting an external antenna etc. Those other users highly recommended their installation. By the time USIW called, I had already switched to Comcast Business Class broadband and have had 0 problems. Much better that USIW or Qwest DSL. YMMV. --- Wayne Johnson, | There are two kinds of people: Those 3943 Penn Ave. N. | who say to God, "Thy will be done," Minneapolis, MN 55412-1908 | and those to whom God says, "All right, (612) 522-7003 | then, have it your way." --C.S. Lewis >________________________________ > From: Mike Miller <mbmiller+l at gmail.com> >To: TCLUG List <tclug-list at mn-linux.org> >Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2013 11:47 AM >Subject: [tclug-list] using USI Wireless in Minneapolis > >I have CenturyLink service, again. It was down for awhile and it was not easy to get service when I had to deal with their call center in the Philippines. They seemed like really nice people and they spoke great English, but when they ordered a service for me, it never happened. They'd give me a tracking number, but the system would still have no record of my order and no record of the tracking number! > >Anyway, while I had no CenturyLink, I used the USI Wireless internet system. They charge $10 for one day, which is ridiculous, but they charge $18 for a week and $25 for a month, or $20 for monthly recurring. > >I had huge problems with lots of disconnects and dropped packets, but I was grateful that I could get something while my CenturyLink was down. When I first signed up, I chose this WiFi connection... > >City of Minneapolis Public WiFi > >...opened the web browser, got a username/password for login and ordered a week of service. After a few days, I realized that I had other options like these: > >usiw_secure >usiw_secure_S06N139T1 >USI Wireless >usiw_secure_S01N129T1 > >I used usiw_secure with the username/password established above, and that made things work a *lot* better. I had been getting highly variable ping times to my office machine, lots of dropped packets, lots of stalling of VNC connection, but now I was getting 30 ms pings, good consistency, no dropped packets, smooth operation of VNC -- everything better. Now it could be some confounder like the time of day, but I'm pretty convinced that the usiw_secure just worked tons better. A speed test showed 1 Mbps both up and down. > >Another thing -- I tried to figure out where in my home I had the best reception. So I started pinging my office machine, once per second (the USI WiFi router didn't respond to ping) and I walked around the house looking for patterns. It seemed best toward the southwest of my house. Is there a better way to test signal strength? Is there a better way to improve reception? > >Anyway, thought I'd put that out there in case it helps anyone, but I also wanted to hear if anyone has any ideas on how to deal better with some of these issues. Thanks. > >Mike >_______________________________________________ >TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota >tclug-list at mn-linux.org >http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20130117/f726c6a8/attachment.html>