I’m interested in installing a Mikrotik bridge (532 & some wireless card, possibly a new rb600) for our backhaul to and ISP (14 miles, clear los) and using it as our main link. We have a network with about 1000 users and I would presume that we would have about 300-500 users browsing the web, some video traffic (1 or 2 video connections) and we will have some voice traffic(possibly 10-20 calls) all going across this link at one time.
Does anyone have some real world experience with this amount of traffic in this type of scenario going through a mikrotik wireless bridge?
As far as the specs of the routerboard goes, should it be able to handle this?
Should I be looking at multiple bridges instead of one? (There are not many channel’s available in the locations where this link is going)
I’ve some experience with links handling about half that number of users. It isn’t really the number of users you should worry about because as a backhaul link, you’re already going to be turning off connection tracking and anything else that would slow down the CPU.
What you should be focusing on is the bandwidth you currently need from that link, and what you expect to be needing in the near future. Get the best dishes you can find, aim them well. Consider real computers at each end pushing the packets rather than routerboards, especially if you need more than 20Mbits across that link.
I do turn connection tracking off on all of our links. Is there anything else that I should be disabling?
As for bandwidth, I think right now we would like to be able to push 10mbit, and in the near to distant future as much as 15-20mbit. I was thinking of going with the rb600 boards for this reason. The other idea was to go with two links.
The location where i’m placing the radios have clear los but there is lots of other noise. Both locations have the entire 5.8 band taken up and so I was thinking of going with something like an xr3 card. Do you know what a license costs for something like that in Canada?
Yes, there are four or five different brands of radios on this location and some of them center on different frequencies. This takes up the 5.2-5.8 spectrum very quickly.
yes motorola solution is really great for backhaul. On motorola canopy, it’s DFS function works really great, it would automatically switch to clear frequency and retest the link every second to find the best frequency.
If you use a mikrotik, i would suggest you to go to nstremedual or try to bond 2 link together.
maybe you could try custom frequency license because it could get you different center frequencies from normal one.