As you guys know my company was having some serious speed and
reliability issues with our existing Trango backhaul some time back. We
have about 25 tower locations in Southern Illinois which until recently
were all fed from these Trango radios. We had countless short outages,
signal irregularities, bandwidth crunches, etc. The Trangos used to work
just fine. In the last year or so the Trango links have become a big
problem for us. We tried several things to fix these problems but the
Trangos were simply being pushed to do more than they were designed to
do. The amount of packet counts, speed, etc. we needed to reliably serve
the towers simply was too much for these radios and they were buckling
under the strain.
I have always thought highly of Alvarion and knew we could probably find
a good place for their equipment in our network someday. Previously the
trouble with choosing Alvarion had always been that we either needed
something they did not offer at the time needed ( as was the case when
we selected Trango for multi-point 5 GHz backhaul back in the day) or
that they were too expensive. Alvarion finally has a place in our network.
In the case of our troubled backhaul links Alvarion's VL product seemed
to fit the bill to help us now. We had seen reports of 50,000 packet per
second throughput and up to 35 megabit per second capacity with the new
Version 4 of the VL firmware. When I asked about the product I was
directed to a guy named Mike Cowan of Wireless Connections who is a RF
engineer and sells Alvarion VL.
Mike spent an incredible amount of time with our staff to look over the
issues we were having and help us find ways of correcting it. He never
charged us a dime for what I consider to be thousands of dollars worth
of support and training. Mike Cowan and Alvarion did more for us to help
us build a better WISP network than any vendor ever has since the day I
became a WISP.
We also had some serious peer to peer traffic issues on our network
which were resolved with a Mikrotik box running to slow down that
traffic. The combination of this box and the new more robust Alvarion VL
backhaul has led customers to remark, "It's like the difference between
night and day". We have zero downtime on our backhaul now. We were
getting countless reports of downtime from our network monitoring system
before. Now it just works.
I don't think I can overstate the impact Alvarion VL has had on my
network. If you are having problems with your network then you need to
at least call Alvarion and give them a shot. In the last three months or
so we have migrated about 40% of our backhaul links over to Alvarion VL.
Since that time outages on those most troubled links have vanished.
Throughput has tripled. People have gone from screaming and yelling to
sending their friends to us to hookup.
If you guys want to compare the numbers out there I am sure you will
find a few different systems that will give comparable umbers to what
we are seeing with Alvarion VL. What you do not see in those numbers is
the quality and the reliability of the system. I have always been a
tinkerer and I will continue to tinker. What I believe though is that
there is something to be said for buying a high-quality, engineered
system and that is what you get with Alvarion VL. If you have tower
locations and/or enterprise customers who cannot afford to be a test
subject for your tinkering then consider calling Alvarion for those
links. There is no shame in admitting you cannot possibly build a system
as reliable as a company who has spent millions of dollars and hired
countless designers to research and build a better data radio. I am
certainly not ashamed to admit it.
For the record, I publicly announced that I would report these findings
after I bought some Alvarion VL some time back. This was prior to
Alvarion joining WISPA as a vendor. While my report here is almost like
reading an Alvarion advertisement I can tell you that it is not. I have
not been paid to give this shining recommendation and Alvarion has
earned my personal support outside of my relationship with them through
WISPA. Thank you, Alvarion, for giving me a better network.
Scriv
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