Since canopy is the most robust(3db C/I, ARQ, etc.) PTMP product in it's
class(and happens to be #1 deployed in US), anyone not using canopy will likely
find themselves conforming to the canopy operators' spectrum usage. As for
coordination among the canopy operators, that's an easy problem to solve...
--
Jon Langeler
Michwave Tech.
Tom DeReggi wrote:
For the golden answer. GPS only helps you design your own network, and
I already take care to use best practices for my own network, when its
comming from myself.
Its all the other people that you have to worry about. Do you think
Public safety or department of transportation is using GPS sync for
all their street pole omnis? Do you think all the corporate end user
PTP links being sold to them by clueless network integrators are GPS
syncing? NOT!
Tom DeReggi
RapidDSL & Wireless, Inc
IntAirNet- Fixed Wireless Broadband
----- Original Message ----- From: "Brian Rohrbacher"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "WISPA General List" <wireless@wispa.org>
Sent: Friday, September 22, 2006 9:03 AM
Subject: Re: [WISPA] Alvarion VL Fixes Problems with Backhaul Links
Would GPS'd Canopy help? If not, why? Do others in the area use
Canopy?
Brian
Tom DeReggi wrote:
Because, over the years I lost 100% of my high ARPU subs that used
5830-ext in these areas. Yes that REALLY hurt the financials of my
business. The reason, is that its a high noise environment where
we're attempting to deploy, and its impossible to offer zero packet
loss solutions with TDD unless ARQ is available, in these
situations. It makes it worse with all the WiFi gear going up,
because you don;t know its there half the time, until its starts
transmiting. (darn I hate contention based). Yes, of course, Beta
ARQ firmware exists for the 5830-ext, but it can't be used
reliably. One of the big mistakes I made is I tried to use it, and
learned that it locks up the SU radios every couple of days, when
under heavy load. I did my testing of it on about 10 links. I
started on 4 low use links, and it appeared to be stable, with only
a random lockup every couple of weeks that I thought was something
else. But after I installed it on the high volume links (other 6),
they started locking up like crazy. (yes used most recent supposedly
fixed firmware). Auto-Reboot devices causing two minutes of downtime
for a reboot, is not adequate for High ARPU large office T1s and
VOIP services. I'd rather not have the business, than to get my
reputation tarnished by installing links the subscriber ends up
cancelling and complaining about. Evey T1 that gets cancelled means
there is a MTU property owner involved that got the word (they make
the referals) and a trusted advisor Computer guy (agents that give
stamp of approval) that gets scared off, when they learn about the
failure. Deals with partners that took months to build get thrown
away over night, with a couple reboots from buggy ARQ firmware.
What you can't forget is that in PtMP, you can't encrease the
antenna side of the AP. Not everything can be solved with the big
antenna on SU side. Without ARQ one is toast.
Trango gave me so much hope when they developed ARQ for the 5800
Foxes, which works fantastically. I'd select the Fox over a 5830-ext
any day because of ARQ. But thats not good enough, I need ARQ and
EXT connectors. Last year, I made Trango aware that we needed ARQ
on 5830-EXT and Link-10s more than anything, and a year later, we
still don't have it, and its not on their priority list. That is
frustrating for my business. Customers don't wait in Urban Tier1
markets. When the Link doesn't go up in a few days, or their were a
couple of noise issues that scare them, they have already placed
their order with someone else.
What it has forced me to do, is slowly start swapping out my Trango
APs, to make room (spectrum and antenna lease fees) for radios that
can deliver packetlossless links. Even Wifi gear can offer
packetlossless links. And its forced me to go back and re-negotiate
my contracts with property owners to try and not pay per antenna, so
I can get more antennas of larger size (PtP) for less money on the
roofs. Its a BIG waste of time, that I wouldn't have to do, if
Trango added ARQ reliable ARQ to 5830-ext.
I'm still a Big Trango fan, and still am basing my business around
its product, because of its value proposition, but I am loosing
sales and getting more black eyes than I have to, because Trango
does not have a EXT antenna product line that delivers reliable
ARQ. I haven't bought a new Trango 5830 AP in ages, I have to many
pulls on the shelf waiting, when I need one. If Trango never
released ARQ for the FOX, I would have never kown what I was
missing. But now that I have experienced it, I can't live without it.
The two biggest reasons, for lack of progress in my company is, 1)
Waiting for technology, and 2) Waiting for finance to come through.
I can't count how much money I burned just waiting. I don't want to
wait any more. I'm tired of waiting. I don't have the energy to keep
waiting. I want it now. I need it now. This is a time to market
business, where there is a domino effect of disaster tied to waiting.
So when a company like Alvarion or Valemont come out with a product
that will do the job, and I no longer have to wait, I see no reason
to wait.
Tom DeReggi
RapidDSL & Wireless, Inc
IntAirNet- Fixed Wireless Broadband
----- Original Message ----- From: "Travis Johnson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "WISPA General List" <wireless@wispa.org>
Sent: Thursday, September 21, 2006 1:25 PM
Subject: Re: [WISPA] Alvarion VL Fixes Problems with Backhaul Links
Tom,
I hate to say this, but I think you missed the boat on your three
$500/mo subs. Trango still offers a 5830-EXT unit for $729 (retail)
that would have allowed you the external antenna that was so
critical for these links. Why did you not spend the $700 and have
them paid for in less than two months?
Travis
Microserv
Tom DeReggi wrote:
I'm glad to hear that John found success with Alvarion.
However, his post does leave out technical detail on why the
equipment had helped, which may be misleading to a reader.
I have found great success with Trango for many reasons, and will
continue to in comming years, and the fact that Alvarion shines in
some areas now, does not conclude that Trango is not a good
platform for WISPs, as Trango products still offers one of the
best value propositions on the market today. There are many
factors to influence what choice is best for you and when.
As far as Alvarion, they are definately back in the game as a
leader in reliabilty for WISPs.
We also have been very please with our live testing results of
their product.
I'd like to point out that Alvarion not only provides top
engineering behind their product (so you don;t have to be one your
self), but also empowers the WISP to take advantage of their own
engineering capabilties. In other words they give the engineering
control back to the WISP. All Alvarion radio products are
connectorized, allowing seperate antennas. Every radio product
shows Signal-to-Nosie ratios in real time while live. What this
allows is for a WISP operator to accurately predict in advance of
a truck roll, what a problem is, and will be required to fix it.
Although it takes a truck roll, the WISP is empowered to make what
ever antenna changes are necessary to fix such link, in the
shortest amount of time, because no Radio reconfigurations or
internal documentations are needed, just the replacement of
desired antenna. I'm an engineer and don;t want to be limited. And
when their is engineering over my head, their is a solid
engineering staff at Alvarion that is available.
What is a fact, is that I had three > $500 ARPU new subs, in the
last two weeks, that were not successfully installed, because they
were teatering right on the edge of the readios capabilty to get
around environmental conditions that were causing minor packet
loss. $500 ARPU subs don't keep service even with MINOR packet
loss. I attempted to get these with our Trango product line,
because that is what is instaleld at the CellSite, taking the
spectrum, with other live clients on the sectors. As a result, I
lost all three, The reason is that Wireless scares prospects, and
every little bit of confidence that we could pull out of them was
required to get the sale in the first place, and the first hint of
difficulty, they get scared and pull the plug, before it starts.
They ask themselves, "What If?". Had I had an external antenna
option, and not been limited, I would be $1500 a month richer this
week.
What I'm learning is that as my business grows, the abilty to
change and move (channel options) is becoming less important that
the abilty to effectively battle it out. The reason is that if
every time I hiot noise, I move away from the channel, eventually
others take those channels., until they are all gone, and their is
no where else to move to. Sometimes its better to claim the space
and say, "I'm here first", "go find another channel to play on".
And keep fighting back with better antennas. As the antenna grows,
you over power the interference, but the important point is, you
reduce the interference to you and them, by restricting the
beamwidth. The high power via antenna you go, the more courtious
it is to the other player to attempt avoidence of signals
interfering. Alvarion gives that advantage.
The point I'm making is that Alvarion "gets it", when providing
ext antenna options, and why its necessary for.
Until Trango puts out an external connector SU, with strong
reliable ARQ feature (required for TDD in noisy environments),
they are at a severe disadvantage in PtMP to competitor vendors.
Because without it, we just loose to many High ARPU prospects.
The problem that we have with Trango right now, is they are making
great accomplishments in their technology for low ARPU markets,
but they have forgotten about taking care of the need of the High
ARPU clients in PtMP in recent years. We don't want minimum
engineering for our high ARPU clients, they don't want the risk,
and neither do we. I am still a big supporter of Trango's value, I
just have recognized that this hole MUST be filled by them soon,
for their product to stay a viable option.
Alvarion on the other hand has managed to solve the current day
problems. But this comes at a price, and the step left for the
provider, is to run the numbers to see if it all works
financially. Alvarion's numbers don't work everywhere, but after
the fact, we are finding that they actually would have worked in
more places than we originally thought.
Now in fairness, I have made some cross comparison between PtMP
and PTP products. The Trango Atlas has an external antenna option
also if doing PTP.
Tom DeReggi
RapidDSL & Wireless, Inc
----- Original Message ----- From: "Mario Pommier"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "WISPA General List" <wireless@wispa.org>
Sent: Thursday, September 21, 2006 11:36 AM
Subject: Re: [WISPA] Alvarion VL Fixes Problems with Backhaul Links
John,
Good to hear you got issues fixed, independent of the
manufacturer/vendor you used.
Regarding the radios you're using now.
Some of us, like our company, started with Alvarion and never
switched out.
It's hard to try other technologies that appear less
expensive, when the one you already have proves itself year after
year after year. And when you can talk to really good
engineering support.
OK, so we haven't found a way to use Alvarion equipment on
residential markets except where we don't have to compete with
$30/mo dsl. But I know some folks, even on this list, who
somehow have done that.
But on the business side, our transition from Alvarion BAII or
900 to VL has had the same response from our customers that you
describe "wow, that is fast". Mind you, these customers are
still limited on our bandwidth manager to the same 1Mbps
symmetrical speeds. But the VL network just seems to fly
compared to the previous, 4 or more year old technologies now.
It's also hard to try out other technologies when someone like
you give a report like this one: I was thinking about using
Trango for a link, but I do not want headaches, not today and not
5 years from today.
Thanks.
Mario
John Scrivner wrote:
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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