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" <[email protected]>
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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