Hell0 all. I recently started working for a company that purchased the failed fiber isp and wisp in my town and we’ve been working to undo 10+years of neglect. High on the list was to upgrade the wireless from aging canopy pmp 100 900mhz/5.7ghz and waverider 900 to something faster and more reliable. Without many options in the 900mhz range we settled on the metal 900 line offered by mikrotik and set about installing them in a low subscriber count area to see how they would work out.
After a bit of work we managed to get the tower access points and customer equipment set up as a wireless bridge and communicating with speeds up to 11mbps. If that had been then end of it I would have been happy but the connections don’t seem to be very consistent. The CCQ% at some sites seems to be fluctuating wildly and in the log I’m seeing connections dropping from excessive data loss. Being fairly new to wireless and mostly familiar with canopy radios and ubiquiti backhauls trying to combat this issue has really got me on the ropes. The configuration is fairly basic, bridged lan and wlan ports. 10mhz channels and there wasn’t much else that it took to get it functioning.
Could there be something that we are missing like setting data limits or changing the wireless protocol that would help our situation?
Some of our customers are are up to 11 miles away from our nearest tower and we have some areas with tree lines along rivers and forest preserves. Unfortunately we were in a position that we either use 900 to keep the customers that we had or switch and lose them. I think if we had used 5ghz we would have gone with Cambium EPMP 1000.
As an update I updated the firmware on our access points and client radios and I started trying out 1 ap with 802.11 another with nstreme and nv2 on the third. The 802.11 ap seems to be working relatively well for the clients on it. The nstreme seems to be having some problems for one individual client who is getting a disconnected, extensive data loss and then comes back with connected, wants bridge. The nv2 access point allows the customers to keep a constant link but the ccq tanks and the connection is almost unusable.
On the customers that have are having the trouble I’m working with signal strengths in the mid -60’s on tx/rx CCQ is in the low 10’s/60’s with a signal to noise ratio of 60db.
When I initially installed these customers everything was on 802.11 and at everyone was pulling about 10-12 Mbps down and 8 Mbps up so this is really vexing me.