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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