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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