Hi,

what's your opinion on this comparison - RB912UAG-5HPnD vs RB922UAGS-5HPacD - while buying gear for new AP tower deployments?

While RB922 is obviously a newer product, better CPU, more RAM, supports AC with backward compatibility for N, has a SFP port (which is great for high towers), has a 1dB higher tx-power figure for MCS7 than RB912, to me it does have a couple really serious drawbacks - no spectral scan/history to determine clean frequencies, no tx-power table. This makes deployment more difficult (we do have a seriously crowded freq and busy masts here). I'm also curious about it's sensitivity - spec sheet states it's 1dB lower for MCS7 and I'm not sure how this translates to real life performance.

RB912 has proven to be extremely good device, we have dozens of them running and they perform flawlessly. But I'm not sure if it's worth to invest in some soon to be obsolete hardware. There are still lots of 11n devices running as CPEs in field and we started to deploy AC CPEs only recently, but they still work only in 11n so AC APs are not that much required at the moment.

What's your opinion on this? Have you noticed any performance increase using RB922 in N mode due to different chipset and separate radio shielding on-board?

i think the big deal of AC is on wifi wlan arena, i dont think 5ghz N gear are obsolete

when doing serious business reliability is the most important feature

Lets bring this topic back since it’s still relevant 3 years later, because both devices are available on market and nothing new has been released for APs in those last 3 years. This time of course there’s no question whether to buy 912 or not, but more a question of upgrading to 922 for networks that are based on all MT CPEs. I haven’t really noticed a difference when running in N-only mode on 912 vs 922, and ac/n mixed-mode haven’t really proven good for me also. I do hear many stories of good results using plain 802.11ac mode in AC-only MT networks, but replacing all CPEs to MT AC wouldn’t be a good move IMHO (I can back my argument).
Sure, MT has a range of really great CPEs, but lets be honest, they’re no good without good AP.

I ask if anyone has done such upgrade (upgrading MT network hardware on AP side) and what are your experiences achieving noticable improvement in bandwidth? WISPs using other manufacturers equipment are selling up to 100M plans and there are plenty success stories with demonstrations with 150M aggregated per sector working in 40MHz. I really want to help MT community to squeeze as much as possible from our networks, so I ask you to share your thoughts.