Nice try, but I've found that comment to be not at all true. I have often
chosen to avoid canopy user's channels, but because I am a good WISP
neighbor, not because I had to. Why fight if you can cooperate. On a SPEC
sheet Canopy does boast the lowest C/I. But Trango's specified C/I was
reported before considering ARQ. And Trango has always underspec'd their
spec sheets. C/I is not nearly as relevant as SNR resilience anyway. With
Arq, we've easilly ran links as low as 4 db above the average noise floor,
reliably. There is VERY little difference between the Trango and Canopy C/I
in real world usage. The Trango just adds more polarities as more options
to work around it, when needed. One of the reasons we like Trango is its
resilience to noise, that gives us the abilty to fight it out and stand our
ground. The Foxes w/ DISH, have excellent ARQ and resilience to Noise,
within their range and LOS.
When we start to have trouble with Trango, is when we start to push the
limits of the technology. Its a LOS technology that we attempt NLOS with.
My arguement is also not that we can't be the last man standing. Its that
when the battle happens the customer sees it, and the customer does not
tolerate it. IF a Canopy and Trango went to war, one might survive a little
better than the other, but ultimately both customers would feel the
interference the majority of the time.
Tom DeReggi
RapidDSL & Wireless, Inc
IntAirNet- Fixed Wireless Broadband
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jon Langeler" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "WISPA General List" <[email protected]>
Sent: Friday, September 22, 2006 4:10 PM
Subject: Re: [WISPA] Alvarion VL Fixes Problems with Backhaul Links
Since canopy is the most robust(3db C/I, ARQ, etc.) PTMP product in it's
class(and happens to be #1 deployed in US), anyone not using canopy will
likely find themselves conforming to the canopy operators' spectrum usage.
As for coordination among the canopy operators, that's an easy problem to
solve...
--
Jon Langeler
Michwave Tech.
Tom DeReggi wrote:
For the golden answer. GPS only helps you design your own network, and I
already take care to use best practices for my own network, when its
comming from myself.
Its all the other people that you have to worry about. Do you think
Public safety or department of transportation is using GPS sync for all
their street pole omnis? Do you think all the corporate end user PTP
links being sold to them by clueless network integrators are GPS syncing?
NOT!
Tom DeReggi
RapidDSL & Wireless, Inc
IntAirNet- Fixed Wireless Broadband
----- Original Message ----- From: "Brian Rohrbacher"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "WISPA General List" <[email protected]>
Sent: Friday, September 22, 2006 9:03 AM
Subject: Re: [WISPA] Alvarion VL Fixes Problems with Backhaul Links
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" <[email protected]>
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" <[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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