I have a 4.4 mile, single chain 802.11A link that is working perfectly. -68 signal strength on both ends. 100/100% CCQ. Good clear line of site. Running 4.5. Pushing 10-15M across it at most times. RB411AH boards. Using MPLS / VPLS bridge. CPU hovers around 25%. 2-3ms ping times (from my office).
When I switch to to N (single chain), I get latency in the 100’s to 1000+ ms. I’ve tried all kinds of combinations with similar results.
Nstreme on, nstreme off. No framer policy either way. Changed HW Retries to 15, disconnect timeout to 00:00:09. No go.
HT Extension channel on / off - a little better with it on (<500ms).
Guard interval long / any - no noticeable difference.
Anything else I’m missing?
[Edit: Changed the subject line to get more attention to the problem after having no replies on this post or from support@mikrotik.com ]
Mikrotik is really dropping the ball on “N” and seems to be turning a blind eye to this problem. I would love to be disproved on this point.
In the past, for reliable, affordable backhaul links, Mikrotik was the only way to go. Now they are going to lose market share to UBNT who has a product that WORKS with MIMO/N. I’d MUCH rather use Mikrotik, but if they continue to ignore the lack of working “N” for backhauls (I won’t even attempt PTMP), we’ve got to look elsewhere. What a shame.
Good luck with SwitchOS, sorry you got beat on wireless…
I have (3) Mikrotik backhaul links using the Mikrotik “N” Cards from Streakwave. All are single stream and working great! LOVE EM, much better than 802.11a 40Mhz
I spent the past month trying to get a PtP backhaul working reliably with R52N cards, but had to swap them out with A cards yesterday. I couldn’t afford to just keep trying different tweaks to ‘try’ to make it stable. 200-600ms latency at times, etc. Couldn’t get it to work without nstreme at all because of distance, and with nstreme it seemed flaky.
411ah on each side.
r52n cards, single and dual chain attempts.
-61 and -65 signal on each polarity.
separated antennas at one end, HDDA5W on the other.
put in f50-pros and now get 100% ccq, rock solid, low latency as expected.
I will try N again in a few months once RouterOS flushes out these “bugs”. Keep up the good work Mikrotik, just please fix this soon.
The ONLY thing I didn’t try was to physically unplug the second chain from the antenna… I did uncheck all of chain 1 but maybe that wasn’t enough. Either way, with dual chains it’s unstable for most people on longer links I believe.
It is a little frustrating. It would be nice to know the status of 802.11N with mikrotik. This post for instance has been up on the boards for 5 days now, you would think one of the mikrotik guys could chime in here and let us know that they are working on it, maybe give us a time frame, etc.
When you don’t hear anything about it, it makes you assume the worse. Maybe it’s broke and they don’t know how to fix it? Who knows?
Noticing a pattern here. Short links (1 mile or so) seem to be working for people. Longer links (4 miles is the shortest “long” link I’ve tried) not so much. Seems like the problem may be in the timing?
I have another new link that is around a mile, dual polarity, no extension channel, not running nstreme and it’s working great. I set the HW Retries to 15, disconnect timeout to 00:00:15 and adaptive noise immunity is on.
I brought this up in another thread with no response, but I wonder if Ack timeout can be tuned to help these longer links?
To be honest unless you have some traffic shaping setup your gonna have those results when downloading with bittorent. I think if thats a single chain link that speed is pretty good. The same thing would happen with a ethernet cable if your maxing it out. Your just flooding it with the torrents. Use pcq queues on the links and set the max rate a little below your best throughput. 11n isn’t some magic switch that means you don’t need to understand routing? Also when I tested using ip tunnels I did have quite bad results. WDS seems to be OK although some people here say tunnels are faster I have not found that so far but only tried EOIP.
Seems there is some specializing in the WISP market now.
MT does a great job in Routing/Management of the core network
which they make great progress (OSPF/BGP is very stable now).
450G gives a good tower switch/router and 1000 is a rock solid smart
Backbonerouter. But MT works low priority on wireless (if at all).
U… seems to specialize on Cheap wireless 11n AP/Gear for
the last mile but needs MT to build a network. Nevertheless
it feels not production quality right now. But has some good
understanding what kind of gear a Wisp wants to see at the
customer/ap side. I believe MT und U… should work together.
High Volume PTP Links are best done with licensed gear or
specialized license exempt gear. Using such equipment now
I feel safe. It’s expensive but just works exactly as promised.
No problems with interference on Backhaul links is a great
improvement.
Baseline: I no longer wait for 11n from MT.
Are you getting decent ping times with load (say 10-15M load?). I’m not. Based on my original post, can you make any recommendations on what to change that has worked for you? If not, thanks for your time anyway.
