I am looking at using Mikrotik for a new WISP and would appreciate your input and comments on a solid and high performance design for the AP’s.
PC mother board with 1Gb ram, and P4 3Ghz CPU.
Please suggest what is a reliable and good performing motherboard brand/model Number to use with Mikrotik.
I plan to use exclusively Ubiquiti radfio cards, as these appear to have a good name, work well in cold weather and work well in areas with high RF.
I will use the 5Ghz band for regular access and 2.4Ghz for hotspot. Would anyone care to elaborate if I should use a seperate PC motherboard for each service?
Given the mother board processing power and memory, how many AP radios can I use on the board without effecting performance, and is 40 users per sector radio expecting too much?
Sorry about all the question guys, this is all new to me and I wish to buy good kit right at the start and not be cheap about hardware or expect too much from what I do run with.
Is there is a release date for the v3 of Mikrotik?
mountain_man -
Search the forum - you’ll see several posts mentioning cpus of 1Ghz or better for up to 70Mbps. Radio card loading will depend on your PCI to MPCI adapter board specs and what the motherboard can handle as far as current requirements for the 3.3 v bus - each SR card can draw up to 1.1 amps - so you’ll need some ‘juice’ to handle more than 3 cards. You also realize that there will be a limit due to the PCI bus freqency as well, more cards means less throughput per card once the bus is max’ed.
There are a few posts w/specific MB not to use or sometimes troublesome boards - these are very few - stick w/name brand, check the specs you are interested in (temp, cpu types, etc) and pick one. Let the rest of us know what you got and how well it works - good info for the next guy…
Many thanks for your reply, and after reading same, I searched around and for ptp I think the rb532 is the board of choice, once it is dedicated to no more than that one link. I would like to stick with XtremeRange radio cards, but use much less than 600mw o/p. Have you seen or heard that combination used with an rb532?
It is essential the radios I use can handle close in RF well, and the XtremeRange look like they have that.
The PC boards I may now not run with. It looks easier to just use another rb532 and use a maximum client count on the 2 sector radios of 30 each, to help with keeping throughput up. I dont mind having to use another rb532 for additional sectors. The power feed to a PC board on a tower is a pain to deal with and more problems I can do without.
mountain_man -
The 532 is a good solid choice especially if you don’t mind sectoring your clients. 5Ghz is a good band to do ‘close in’ service. You know 5ghz doesn’t have the ‘legs’ that 2.4ghz does, but in 5Ghz there are more non-overlapping channels, less interference, and you can ‘stack’ channels better by alternating VPOL/HPOL with a few feet of physical seperation and the right antenna.
As to the XR cards - I have tried several times in setting the power out manually on the SR cards, I am going to have to assume here that the XR card drivers are the same and say that unless you have an the extremely trying RF climate that you should either use the SR cards in the APs (multipoint) to keep within the FCC codes - and let MT software set the card power to defaults. Something in MT just doesn’t set the power right for these cards. Everytime I have set them manually and then compared to the ‘default’ settings the default always performs better…go figure! If your choice of sector antennas and the XR card will keep you in FCC regs then there is no reason not to go ahead and use the XR card. For me - the sector antennas I use have too much gain to use the XR cards. Of course I have used the XR cards for a couple of client end systems where the PtP FCC rules apply and they have worked perfectly…
As to the number of clients per sector…tough to judge on that one…depends on the throughput requirements, etc. I have a couple of sectors w/about 50 per, no problems. I have a couple with fewer than 10 - these are high bandwidth business clients - got to keep them happy!
One more thing, the new RB532 are 400Mhz so you can eck out a few more Mbps now. MT also promises to have 1Ghz MT (maybe it was 800Mhz) boards out sometime this year… Could be a good year!! I for one am tired of building custom PC solutions for our larger relay, service and HIGH throughput business clients points.
Well mountain_man that’s about it - come back to the forum anytime - usually you get pretty good responses from folks here - unlike some message forums where you get RTFM as an answer to every question…
mostly - if you have knowladge of what you are doing you will get proper answer, but there are users who do not know anything - then they will get link to manual.