Service Provider Mobility: Ball State

University students post their first Indoor CPE

product review!

Posted by Olivier Bruxelle Apr 2, 2010

Hello everyone! We're making great progress with our WiMAX network, and have been
testing many devices and would like to share the results with you!

For our first product review, we have tested an indoor CPE device, the Seowan Intech
SWC-5100. This first blog post will speak more to the consumer/user of the device. Next
week, we will post the extra-geeky stuff, so stay tuned!

Tech Specs

Brand: Seowan
Intech

Item: WiMAX Indoor CPE (Customer Premises Equipment)

Model: SWC – 5100 (2.5 GHZ)

FCC ID: 2009/07/31

Input: 12 V

Make: KOREA

PRODUCT FEATURES

• Intelligent WiMAX CPE designed for residential and small-medium business

customers
• Compliant IEEE 802.16e and Wave 1 cor2/D3, Wave2
• Provide VoIP interface for Telephone Service

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Service Provider Mobility: Ball State University students post their first Indoor CPE product review!

• Up to 30 Mbps Downlink and 6Mbps uplink

Test Configuration

The tests have been conducted on the Ball State WiMAX network comprised of 3 Cisco
BWX 8305 WiMAX base stations and 2 Cisco BWX 8415 WiMAX base stations. The signal
strength observed during the tests was between -76dB and -67dB. The CNR (Carrier to
noise ratio) was around 21dB. The results observed suggest that the device will deliver
good performance. Users should be aware that the CPE will still function with degraded
signal strength but the performance will be greatly affected.

All the speed observations have been conducted with the software netpersec.

Test results

A speed test has been conducted with the Ball State University “My Speed Test”
tool that is available at www.bsu.edu/noc.

A download speed of 11.29 Mbps and upload speed of 1.26 Mbps have been observed
during this test.

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Service Provider Mobility: Ball State University students post their first Indoor CPE product review!

The performance is really good when you compare the device speeds with that of DSL or
cable. Frequently, users of either service will observe speeds around 2Mbps down and
1Mbps up.

After testing the general speed of the connection, more practical tests have been conducted
to see what a user can expect from this WiMAX CPE.

FTP download and upload tests

Download

A 130Mb file has been used in the ftp download test. An average of 12.2Mbps has been
observed during the test and it took 1 minutes and 29 seconds to download the entire file.

Upload

A 1.8Mb file has been used to conduct the ftp upload test. Less than 12 seconds elapsed to
upload this file. The average speed observed during the test was 4.5 Mbps

Web downloading

To test the download speed on Internet, we have downloaded an .iso file from Ubuntu.com.
The size of this file was 698Mb. The download took around 10 min with an average speed of
6.8Mbps. Again those results are pretty good compared to DSL and cable.

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Service Provider Mobility: Ball State University students post their first Indoor CPE product review!

Usability

The CPE is really easy to use. The user just needs to plug an Ethernet cable between the
CPE and his/her computer. No configuration is needed to start using the system.

For a more advanced user whom may wish to further configure the device (port
forwarding, frequencies used…), the web-interface is well designed and is easy
to understand. The more advanced functions have not been tested during this
first contact test.

The CPE also offers VoIP services if a phone is plugged into it. This feature has not been
tested yet but will be the subject of a future blog post, so stay tuned!

As always, please feel free to ask questions, or offer your comments. We'd be happy to
reply!

103 Views Tags: 4g, wimax, mobile_internet, bsu

Apr 7, 2010 12:26 PM Jonathan Morgan

Hi Olivier,

Thanks for the post and review. I'm looking forward to the extra geeky stuff when you get a
chance.

I'm especially interested in the VoIP services and how they perform in the future.

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Service Provider Mobility: Ball State University students post their first Indoor CPE product review!

Regards,

Jon

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