Though Wi-Tribe has yet to officially launch Wimax services, it has started providing test CPEs to a lucky few who live within the areas of Islamabad covered by the service. We happen to be in one such area and were able to try it out.
Firstly, the Motorola CPE they are providing (the CPEi 750, pictured here) is a very sleek one without any protruding antennae or noisy fans (this was one of the complaints we had with Wateen’s earlier CPEs).
Signal strength varied a lot; excellent in one room, zero in another. Even at the same location, it kept switching between excellent and downright poor. To give credit to Wi-tribe, they did do some maintenance a few days ago which improved the quality.
Next, came the plug and play test. It all worked flawlessly on our Windows systems, though a laptop running Ubuntu had to have some manual tweaking done. It worked fine after specifying a DNS server manually.
That had something to do with the DHCP parameters passed by the CPE, but the Wi-Tribe support team patiently noted down the details and promised to work on the issue and try to iron it out.
Next came the test of the actual network working behind the scenes. Wi-Tribe has chosen their uplink providers carefully so we had no trouble browsing and downloading at a cool 1Mbps. That isn’t very impressive when compared to existing DSL or fiber optic offerings, but remember that we’re talking about a somewhat infamous, long-range, wireless technology.
We’ll have to wait and see how Wi-Tribe performs once they’ve launched and have to worry about such things as billing, customer support and corporate needs. For now, it looks better than the competition.
