I have seven relays installed with the backbone setup with 802.11A 5.8ghz 22dbi grid’s and clients 802.11b/g omni down to clients setup with panel antanni’s. On average I have 12 clients per relay at this time.
One one particular tower which is on a mountain top and 100 feet up a fm radio station tower. This is what I consider my main relay. I have clients on 802.11b that are 13 miles away in fact my two west and east customers are almost exactly 180 degree from each other so I could say I cover a 26 mile radius.
I also run VOIP services to the clients running my own voice server and connections to the local telco and have my own block of telephone numbers as well as the ability to transfer existing numbers to the voip boxes. (even 911 compatible).
As you can tell we have a pretty good network setup but there is room to improve it which leads me to several questions.
let me give some stats: one 5.8ghz link is 1/2 mile and has a strength of -59 and the other link is 2 miles and has a strength of -76. All four sides are 22 db grid antani’s
my throughput using the built in bandwidth test (i know shouldn’t use it but thats what i have to work with at the moment), the -59 shows 10M throughput transmit or receive but not at the same time. and the -76 link shows a throughput of 3M send and 4M receive.
the -76 shows 36Meg connect and the -59 shows 54Meg connect.
(all cards are 400mw)
So my first question is: Does signal strength have the biggest factor on throughput?
Second question is: Does it make any difference if you using 5.8 over say 5.1 which is also available, and/or why would you use 5.1 over 5.8? better/worse distance.. interference’s issues?
Third question is: on 802.11 b/g I’ve read some place that B has a limit of about 3meg and G has a limit of about 19 meg of throughput at any one time? is this correct?
Fourth question: I’ve run into some issues with voip getting bad and everything just slows down on the network. Now I’ve limited via a que everyone to 1Meg temporarly (which mostly fixes the voip issue but slows everyone down) however when people do any type of downing it pulls at a max of 100k. Is that a correct measurement?
fifth question: should I run netstream on the backbone? I have turned it on over the last few days not seen much difference but I did have to turn polling off. When I had polling on I had very erratic and much higher pings.
sixth should I go to higher db antani’s to improve throughput?
Thanks!