A have to say, some pf those past comments are a bit unfair, and not relevent to the question asked.
Maybe because Patrick is now at Aperto, and not here to defend Alvarion? :-) We dont deploy Alvarion, but we have used it in some cases. It simply is not cost justified for us, since how we deploy. We generally have a very low CPE count per AP, and Alvarion has a heavy AP price, and we serve mostly Multi-tenant buildings, requiring high capacity CPE, and Alvarion charges more for allowing full throughput both at the AP and CPE. Licensing cost for full featured CPE/AP is expensive, no doubt. We can talk all day about why it might not be cost justified. Or maybe how it lacks on-the-fly flexibilty being single pol, single band. But saying that the gear does not perform, (or worse in noise compared to products of similar class) simply is not true. Alvarion was one of the first that actually developed firmware optimized for quality VOIP. Their adaptive modulation routines work well. There ability to scan at CPE for noise remotely is cool. There insightfulness to have exterior LED represent SNR instead of RSSI was ingenious. They have super clean RF transmitters/receivers, because they are intentionally single band radios. It might even have better embedded filters? Alvarion uses the same Atheros OFDM RF Chip as any other Atheros radio, how in the world can one justify saying that Alvarion has worse RF performance in noise? It all boils down to SNR for everybody. Alvarion does however have enhancements, to make it one better than gear that uses just a basic Atheros chip. And Alvarion is designed to enable operators to select antennas of choice to enable full allowable power within the band. Many successful large scale residential projects are based on Alvarion VL, because it can scale with large CPE relatively well. My point here is it important to compare apples to apples. Sure, Canopy, Trango, and even Proxim DSSS systems with Circular can handle noise much much better than OFDM and QAM modulation type gear can. Its reasons why we still use Trango in many of our noisy PtMP locations. But comparing Alvarion VL to other OFDM products, I believe Alvarion compares very well. I'd argue that Alvarion is probably one of the best perfoming radios still based on CDMA/CA, because of their proprietary MAC. Although I agree there are advantages to Polling which Is why we primarilly use polling systems, there are many advantages to CDMA/CA also, and it should not be discounted because of that, unless its determined a Polling system is actually needed for the application. Saying Alvarion VL has nothing much over WIFI, is a croc, and simply not true. We haven't even discussed the rock solid hardware, such as thick heatsink cases, etc. Tom DeReggi RapidDSL & Wireless, Inc IntAirNet- Fixed Wireless Broadband ----- Original Message ----- From: "Brad Belton" <b...@belwave.com> To: "'WISPA General List'" <wireless@wispa.org> Sent: Saturday, April 24, 2010 8:05 PM Subject: Re: [WISPA] Alvarion VL Users Agreed. A few years ago we tried (very hard) to deploy Alvarion VL. Crashed and burned to the point we were tarnishing our reputation with a valued client before we threw in the towel. No mechanism to deal with noise AT ALL. For rural or third world deployments I bet it does great, but for an unfriendly RF environment Alvarion VL is not a good fit IMO. Best, Brad -----Original Message----- From: wireless-boun...@wispa.org [mailto:wireless-boun...@wispa.org] On Behalf Of Jeremy Parr Sent: Saturday, April 24, 2010 6:59 PM To: WISPA General List Subject: Re: [WISPA] Alvarion VL Users On 24 April 2010 19:55, Charles Wu <c...@cticonnect.com> wrote: > Any Alvarion VL users out there? We're inheriting several towers, and curious about performance -- in particular with voice and contention Poor. No RADIUS auth for MAC, no polling (contention based), no transmit sync. The only real benefit over WiFi is the support for variable frame sizes in later firmware/hardware releases. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
