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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