I am toying with the idea of providing internet access from atop our mountain here in southern california. I have the possibility of reaching 100,000 homes at our location. In the discovery I am wondering what the broadcast distance from AP to client would be for the following types of antennas:
I am curious about the omni ranges - can you get a 5-10 miles out of them with a directional client antenna or is that dreaming? All clients would really be within 120-180 degrees of the AP.
If we use a sectoral antenna will clients within a few miles of each other be able to still connect to the AP, or would it be limited to a smaller footprint on the ground below?
Just wondering if I will need more than 2-3 antennas on the mountain top to reach the area outlined on the picture above. And is providing wireless to clients 5-10 miles away worthwhile? Line of sight is visible from almost every home on that map : )
If everybody is in that 120-180 degree arc, I’d put a good waveguide antenna up there. I’ve seen problems with omni’s up high like that, while they can see for miles, the problem is “they can see for miles”, they get to hear all the noise from every source imaginable. Add to the fact they are lower gain then the waveguide and you’re wasting half your power in a direction that is useless, and the extra cost for a good antenna might be money well spent.
Once you get up there though, clients 5-10 miles away shouldn’t be a problem.
So is it safe to say that you cannot provide wireless internet to 500 clients on a single machine - no matter the processor size and number of wireless cards? Are there not many people providing wireless internet to residential customers?
i am doing this but not from 1 location . we sectors and spilt a area up . you could most likely get maybe 50-100 units per radio .
the main reason you cannot have so many people or clients on one radio
is thru put lets say you have 50 cpe’s going to one radio and lets say your
customers are all with in 3miles you are giving them what is called best effort service . which basicly means you will give them oh 1.5mb thruput
and if half of them are online at once your radio thruput in going to suck.
its a gamble but it would be safe to say 50 heavy users would be about the limit of each radio.
the faster the processor the better performance you clients will get . but i still think if you go over 100 cpe’s per radio is too much..
also how much bandwidth are you going to have at you main location
There is another limitation that come in for 802.11b, it’s a polling protocol and the more radios that are registered, the more polling that gets done. Past a certain point the radio is so busy polling that it can’t pass traffic efficiently and still poll everybody.
As a general rule, I don’t put more than 64 customers on any given radio. That might be conservative, but it’s worked fairly well.
thats what we use to do with all are karlnet radios or should i say they had a limit of 64 client connection . reggie was working on before they were bought out on a 128 client version dont know what ever happened to it we tested it but it was not stable past 90 clients this was with 2.4 silver card . dont know if the newer cm9’s would handle it better the lucent cards
Just to clarify, 802.11b is a collision based MAC, polling is what you actually want in preference.
Google for “hidden node” and you should find plenty on this.
OT: Is it possible to tell when you are getting close to the maximum number of clients on an AP without waiting 'till you are over it and performance takes a dive?
If you only have the one location, it should be possible to put multiple radios in a box (or for that matter, different boxes) and put them on separate (non-adjacent or overlapping) frequencies, pointing separate antennas at the same coverage sectors.
Doesn’t help with “overall coverage” which might be better with multiple base sites, but you might be constrained otherwise. Obviously there are a lot more frequencies at 5GHz to avoid self-interference doing this.
I’m guessing you use separate SSIDs on each radio to regulate the loading per radio, but other users might want to comment here - is there another way?
Totally agree, sectored base sites are best, with traffic loading as well as interference and range considerations.
What do people prefer most - 90 or 120degree sectors?
Think about pole with 5 sector 802.11a antennas and Pentium IV with max GHZ and Ram, and you can reach arround 350 users
BUT!!! If I could have chance to do service for more than 500 users I would do 5 Mikrotiks without thinking!
Use 802.11a and sector on different frequencies and I can bet you can go 100+ per AP with atheros.
Currently i reached ~70 users per AP on 802.11b without expiriencing slownes, but no p2p and communication between users is off…
Block p2p, online gaming, VOIP, limit max connections and only god knows how many users you can serve.
Also it is very important what kind of service you want to provide???
If you want to give them high quality of service, forget for whole thing…
If you want to give them browsing, download, mail, chat, it’s cool, you can do it
on this subject . we need to replace all our karlnet equipment and want to use MT but we have heavy users on system mostly business clients. 2mb plus per user about 20 user per site . karlnet ap1000 work well most of the time. be testing MT for about 4 months and worried about performance and qos . now with MT we can filter and give better qos .
any suggestions . looking at using 1 ap per 20-30 heavy users with p4 3ghz system working on kooling issue in system
amd processors have a greater heat output then intel . plus they can have issues of locking up for no reason other then they just wanted to cause you a headache . i had tested some amd processors they do work but are way hotter then a intel so if your using them on a tower forget it . in a controled room maybe . i would still go with intel.
With Mikrotik Router OS. I’m talking about strange 100% processor usage etc… My personal PC is AMD, but it’s just my PC For something serious I wouldn’t use AMD
We’re usign AMD Semprons 2200+ and 2300+ on ASUS A7V8X-X (with 128 MB RAM) (4 base stations, 1-4 atheros’es + 0-1 prism’s 2.5 on each). No problem (only this heat now… summer is comming!). Be sure to take care about cooling (today - 36 celsius in shadows, inside of MT boxes on stations - ~50 celsius). I’ve noticed problems with other MB: AsRock KT-something. Those two MB’s are based on KT400, but AsRock wasnt stable - so we’ve changed it (its simple - ASUS is STABLE).
Clients make 4-5 mbit/s on each - we’ve got some rules on firewall - cpu load floats about 1-9 percent. On AMD Celeron 600 - about 25-60 percent (… and sometimes higher pings). Tested on MT 2.8.13, 2.8.27, 2.9rc1, rc2 and now working on MT 2.9rc4.
I recommend Athlon Mobile 2000+. It can work having 100 celsius temp.! Semprons arent so hard - they’ll work only in 0-60 celsius temp.
