We've been using VL since it came out. I would also recommend the 5.5.26 firmware for vl 5.8ghz.
We routinely install it on overlapping or adjacent channels on the same tower. (I.e. 5830 for a backhaul, 5820 for a sector 40 feet away). If you have revA gear, change it to rev C or better and sell or reuse the revA gear for a rural low volume backhaul. In revB and newer hardware, it has some things 5ghz wifi stuff doesn't. Packet aggregation of up to 4000+ byte radio packets is possible with rev c or newer. This lets you do very high PPS rates for small packets that regular wifi gear won't do. The modulation adaption algorithm is completely adjustable. The retries, etc.. are all fully adjustable. Spectrum analyzer is very nice. You have adjustable noise floor for use in high interference areas. You also have ATPC which I think all gear should have. It's got something called drap for prioritizing voice calls, but I can't explain it. Every feature is highly tweakable. It's completely programmable with SNMP. We have a script to program customer radios before they go out the door with installers. After it's installed, everything is monitorable with SNMP, unlike MT, ubnt, etc.. It has a nice 500+ page pdf manual for the software and everything is well explained, unlike MT/UBNT. The software is reliable; I have links with uptimes over a year. It's available in US certified 5.4. They have quality integrated MTI antennas. The major downfall of VL is the CPE are speed limited, requiring an upgrade key purchase to get full speed. For this reason, we are upgrading some sectors to UBNT-M5 for more customer speed. We'll reuse the VL radios elsewhere as we are spoiled by them. A minor downfall is their support ticketing system only uses IE, but we don't deal with their support very much. On Sun, Apr 25, 2010 at 10:15:44AM -0400, can...@believewireless.net wrote: > VL has been a love/hate for us. When it works, it works great. > However, it has several serious flaws. It has the same > associate/dis-associate issue seen with other WDS implementations. If > a weak client continues to associate/dis-associate, packet loss to all > radios on the sector happens and can even shut down the AP for long > periods of time. No easy way to see on the AP the number of times > this happens either. SNR is completely worthless for determining > anything. Some of our worst channels are ones where clients show > fantastic SNR. And, as said before, noise is a killer. It's very > difficult to co-locate APs on the same tower even with 20 MHz of > separation. > > Now that Canopy 430 is out, we'll be ditching Alvarion and moving to > Canopy. Canopy has been the best product we have used and the > software continues to mature and while bug fixes are slow to be > released, they typically are addresses. > > > -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > WISPA Wants You! Join today! > http://signup.wispa.org/ > -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > > WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org > > Subscribe/Unsubscribe: > http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless > > Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ -- /* Jason Philbrook | Midcoast Internet Solutions - Wireless and DSL KB1IOJ | Broadband Internet Access, Dialup, and Hosting http://f64.nu/ | for Midcoast Maine http://www.midcoast.com/ */ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
