Good evening all,
I am talking to you about a bit event project that i do have next month.
There will be a big music festival.
5000 People are expected
Target : Deploy free wifi to everybody

The issue is : it will take place in france in middle of no where
To get internet we are would like to try that :
Link 1 ftth : 500Mbps/s Down and 300 Mb/s Up from a neighbor at 1000m, the link is made by 2 LHG 60 link
Link 2 LHG 4G kit, the antenna is at 10 km, site to site, the link is visible, expecting 100mbps Down/30mbps Up
Link 3 LHG 4G kit, the antenna is at 10 km, site to site, the link is visible, expecting 100mbps Down/30mbps Up
Link 4 LHG 4G kit, the antenna is at 10 km, site to site, the link is visible expecting 100mbps Down/30mbps Up
Link 5 LHG 4G kit, the antenna is at 10 km, site to site, the link is visible expecting 100mbps Down/30mbps Up
Link sum : 900 Mbps/down and 400 Up

Architecture :
Links 1+2+3+4+5 ->
- >ALL Connected to Router 1 : CCR 1036, configured : all ISPs links will be aggregated with load balancing made with PCC (both addresses and ports)
Then from it a link will go from Router 1 -> Router 2
-> Router 2 : CCR 1036 Configured DHCP, DNS, NAT, ROUTES, PCQ with 2mbps/users and connected to it :
-> 2 Hotspot server radius (radiusdesk, coovachili) (hardware dell : r610) (2 hardware servers for redundancy)
-> it will have connected ALL the wifi access points :
12 ACCESS POINTS are xirrus 4820 AP ( Each AP has : 8 radios, 16 directional antennas, and 2,4G and 5g, with a load balancing of clients between radios, and roaming L2/L3 between AP,
can take up to 1000 clients each)
Each AP will be place at 30m from each others

Now you know everything about this project, i wanted to ask you, if you think it can work properly ? suggestions ? would you do it differently ?

Thank you very much

Target : Deploy free wifi to everybody

-> 2 Hotspot server radius (radiusdesk, coovachili) (hardware dell : r610) (2 hardware servers for redundancy)

Hi,

I'm not too familiar with this kind of event, but if you are providing free access why do you need radius/hs and so much hardware? Just for a landing page ?
Also your 2 routers are both single point of failure.

I wil consider failover yes instead of pcc, but we woud like to get acces from 4G antennas that can't be reached by everybody because it is at 10km, i guess a phone can't get that far...

Do you think i need to consider putting 1 redundant router in the middle doing :
PCC/Failover, PCQ, DNS DHCP, Hotspot etc and will be the failover of the 2 others ?

We need hotspot to let them sign the settlement and landing page.

Theses AP are really powerful, it is like 8 AP in one with directional antenna, it is 75% less wires deployment hardware.

Any other suggestion to make it safer ? or better ?

You dont have enough nonoverlapping channels in your scenario.
you are talking about 96 radios in a 200m radius.
you will need careful channel planning if you are planning to use that many radios.

wifi wyse :
Will put a lower trasnmittion power, on every AP there is 8 radios and will assign 3 Radios will be on channel 2.4G : 1,6,11, the 5 others will be on a 5ghz channels : there is much more non overlapping..
The cells size will be small, plus directional antennas, and low power.

Don't you think it is enough ?

Thank you

Are these AP‘s Controller based?

yes they are, they also communicate between each others, load balance users, and have a dedicated omnidirectionnal antenna to scan always

Do you think i need to consider putting 1 redundant router in the middle doing :
PCC/Failover, PCQ, DNS DHCP, Hotspot etc and will be the failover of the 2 others ?

I'm not aware of any physical Mikrotik device that can stack, albeit something can be achieved with some scripting you still need to move wires. I suppose you could use a switch stack but this would only complicate things. To keep things simple, I'd at least have a cold spare - this means 3 routers. Or if you only have 2, use one router and keep the other as cold spare.
From your setup, the most cpu would be used for nat. A single 1036 can handle the aggregate traffic for all your wan links.

I'd go for router redundancy. Configure both the same and use vrrp.
500/300 is way enough for 5k attendees, I totally second the proposal of using 4G just as failover.
I do a lot of festivals (with attendee counts between 10000 and 120000) on a very regular basis and I can tell you from my experience that the take rate will be less than 50% and most clients idle about 95% of their connected time.
I'd vote for getting some stackable switches between the arrays and the routers, each array connected with both ethernet prots to one switch each which will add another layer of resilience. Connect all your WAN links to these switches as well and configure dedicated vlans for WAN links.
Make sure you set the cell size to small or even manually lower TX power further down to enforce a decent roaming. Also, remove the lower rates so that clients have to roam earlier and don't eat up airtime on low rates.
Don't use 2.4GHz, it's really PITA with really sticky clients and ensures a poor user experience. Don't use 802.11a either. Use 20MHz channels only.
Make sure you do everything about proper client isolation (keep in mind that client isolation on one AP just isolates clients connected to the same AP, but they will see clients on all the other APs. Bridge horizon on the routers and pvlans on the switches will help you here)
Block multicast directly on your arrays. Make sure to set decent dhcp lease times (at least 2x the time a festival day lasts, this will offload dhcp renewal processes while being live).
Experienced responsiveness depends a lot on DNS. Make sure you grant some decent amount of memory for cache and adjust concurrent queries accordingly. If budget allows, get a dedicated DNS server in a vm running on a RAM disk (I recommend using unbound as a DNS server). Make sure your upstream servers can stand the load.

Good luck!
-Chris

I had about 2k people on open air festival recently. In any given moment, there were no more than 50 people connected and the ptmp backbone made of grooveA (i.e. Capped at 150mbit) was never utilized for 100%.
It was also in the middle of nowhere and the 4g would be absolutely useless. We had experience from previous years that 3g/4g simply collapses -we lost huge amount of money because our EFTPOS terminals wouldn't stay connected until I was asked to provide wifi

Maybe your situation will be different but current description seems to me like big overkill.

I'd go for router redundancy. Configure both the same and use vrrp.

You'd need this on the wan side, which doubles the count of links or requires some switch there. Else you're back at moving cables by hand -> downtime.

@zaza355N, just saw this thread...what was the conclusion – did that work okay? Any problems with Xirrus AP

We use Mikrotik routers for events: normally use ECMP routes to distribute load and the expose different VLANs for different event use cases with some kinda QoS applied (e.g. different networks for public, event staff, show equipment, etc.). But normally the wi-fi distribution is where things can go wrong providing internet to large events... clients not being able to connect to wi-fi because of 802.11 congestion, and thus not even able to use the available bandwidth in the first place. Various in available upstream bandwidth...such as the RF links in the example not performing as well under load, is typically where QoS someplace helps a lot (L2 priority, queues, interface limits, etc) to avoiding congestive collapses in the network.

The Xirrus APs purposed here use some proprietary/non-standard 802.11 scheme to load balance across all 2.4G / 5G wi-fi channels to better deal with high density wi-fi. But I've neversed them directly with a Mikrotik, and only tacitly familiar with them. My thought is Xirrus APs would help to some automatic tuning for density...but nothing can fix RF saturation and/or I'd imagine Xirrus complex 802.11 tricks could go bad since there is a lot software involved in Xirrus tricks. Thus curious how zaza355N actually turned out