HWMPplus / WDS mesh

RouterOS Wireless Networking
1

Hi,
I am looking to get a WISP service set up in a village that is slightly different to some. The village is approximately 100 buildings along one side of a single road. The only ‘high’ ground around it is forest, the road is not straight and there is no line of sight to the whole village due to bends in the road and obstructions by trees. Furthermore, there are no roof tops that could serve more than a small handful of properties at a time.

Here is what I am thinking and I am looking for thoughts on how a) will this work; b) how efficient it will be; and, c) how to effectively optimise it.

I plan to drop a fibre circuit in to the village and then have a CE for each building on the roof (thinking GrooveA 52 ac) with the customer’s device wired out the bottom. I am looking to use these as relays using HWMPplus/WDS to form a mesh along the length of the street and that’s there the questions come in. I plan to wind the power down to avoid UK licensing… less than 1W in band B 5470-5730 MHz is licence exempt outdoors), which should be enough to at least get the nearest few neighbours in each direction but how many nearby mesh members should i be looking to include and what would the maximum number of hops from one end to the other be to ensure a decent performance?

I have not tested mesh fully yet but, as it’s L2, do I just trunk necessary VLANs down to each customer premises or do I need to do anything fancy across the mesh?

Many thanks.

2

First of all make sure you choose right hardware. The Groove is not a good choice, as it’s single chain only, right from the start you have half the bandwidth of 2x2 link.
In scenario you describe, I would not use WDS or meshing at all. Instead, build a high capacity backbone with 60GHz gear (wAPs connected back to back), multiple hops along the valley… or at least close to the fiber uplink point. Then multiple client APs with something like mANTs or cheap SXTs for clients. If it’s deep valley where you basically have no interference and entire 5GHz band for you, you can use AC gear instead of 60GHz and wide channels… but 60GHz is 1Gbit/s FD which is awesome.
It’s all down to what bandwidth you need, but unless you provide only a few megabits, using mesh is really bad idea. It’s better to have defined backbone where you can control congestion and clearly see what’s happening.

3

Thanks for the reply r00t. My main concern around this is I have limited options for repay sites other than customer roofs. Any thoughts getting this done in a way that doesn’t rely in single customers not tripping their electricity etc.?