Mikrotik has only 3 60Ghz channels for use. 58.32Ghz, 60.48Ghz and 62.64Ghz.
I have a couple of Metrolinq's 60Ghz units and they have for Spain 4 channels available. 58.32Ghz, 60.48Ghz, 62.64Ghz and 64.80Ghz.

Why is this?
I noticed that Mikrotik doesn't have any country setting in the 60Ghz wireless part anyway. Why is that? Is the use of 60Ghz world wide the same? And if so, why is MT not having the 4rd channel?

Since we are very happy with the use of the 60Ghz spectrum for micro cells and small backhauls (STABLE!!! and HIGH CAPACITY) we are using them now to succes to avoid the 5Ghz 'spectral chaos'.
But only 3 (or 4 in case of ML) channels is little. Given that a 2000Mhz wide channel also give very high throughput, many of the clients never need (I mean, 1Gb aggregated? I have only 500Mb to sell to my 750+ clients.....)
If these 2000Mhz channels could be split in 1000Mhz wide ones we can use more units in close working range and still have plenty capacity to distribute to our customers...

So is this in the pipeline? Smaller channels. Or is it prohibited by IEEE/Regulatory rules?

I think somewhere it was stated that 3 channel limitation is from the used 802.11ad radio chip, so that's probably not going to change unless they upgrade hardware.
Or it would be nice to get new 60GHz radios with SFP or new 2.5/5Gbit/s wired ports so full channel capacity can be utilized.

I think somewhere it was stated that 3 channel limitation is from the used 802.11ad radio chip, so that's probably not going to change unless they upgrade hardware.
Or it would be nice to get new 60GHz radios with SFP or new 2.5/5Gbit/s wired ports so full channel capacity can be utilized.

Would be nice if MT technician can shine a light on this.

I think they indeed should extend their line of 60Ghz product. Indoor routers, outdoor units with SFP or 10G ports, radio with built in 5Ghz radio for backup in same antena housing/exterior antena. This new 60Ghz frequency range can be exploited much more then we'd see now. And with Mikrotik prices they can conquer back a market share they lost over the last years.
We can also think of 10Ghz, 11Ghz, 24Ghz radios. They should hire some more technicians. With the ROS they can beat every alternative system in versatility and price.

indoor router on 60ghz? trollolol... i suggest to go to technical unviersity and get a basic physics.
2nd, attenuation of 60gsmthz - 3ch more than enought
3rd, for such freq, LOS and high directional accuracy is one of the requirements... (ptp <500m)
4rd, mostly ppl uses it instead of building fiber link 1.25gb, no one cares that u need only 500mbps it does not mean, that all will need 500mbps.

the only thing that i would agree to add a possibility for redundancy in 5ghz, as poe-out port for sextant lets say, to install it in vicinity, and simplier redundancy configuration smthng like port x, tick reduntant to port x+1 ( instead of adding rules + wasting time ). sure it is possible to read and insert, but as feature will be used by many users i think - could be wiser to add as default.

Having only 3 channels available might not be enough for 360deg coverage - it would be nice to do a 4-sector ABAB setup using only 2 channels with synchronization. Since there is plenty of bandwidth available, even simple fixed 50/50 uplink/downlink division would be good. NV2 synchronization shows it can be done even without GPS timing, perhaps it could be done in 60GHz products too?

indoor router on 60ghz? trollolol... i suggest to go to technical unviersity and get a basic physics.
2nd, attenuation of 60gsmthz - 3ch more than enought
3rd, for such freq, LOS and high directional accuracy is one of the requirements... (ptp <500m)
4rd, mostly ppl uses it instead of building fiber link 1.25gb, no one cares that u need only 500mbps it does not mean, that all will need 500mbps.

the only thing that i would agree to add a possibility for redundancy in 5ghz, as poe-out port for sextant lets say, to install it in vicinity, and simplier redundancy configuration smthng like port x, tick reduntant to port x+1 ( instead of adding rules + wasting time ). sure it is possible to read and insert, but as feature will be used by many users i think - could be wiser to add as default.

1). Major vendors like Netgear are working on the first indoor 60Ghz solutions. The disadvantage of no penetrating walls etc. can also work into a great advantage. No more interference from nearby competing wifi routers.
As with every standard, each has its pro's and con's. It only takes smart use to make a technology a succes. That success probably won't come from your end...

2). Attenuation makes 3 channels more then enough? How come I already have an issue in finding the proper channels in my 6x 60Ghz radio tower? It's that Metrolinq gives me one more frequency otherwise I had a problem....

3). All 802.11ad vendors claim distances up to 1,5km. Maybe you should read up a little bit more into the technology.

4). Like my side note on 1). Carriers or high-end solution providers are not the ones making 60Ghz a success technology. It's the bottom end (wifi at home/office) or WISP's that will. In urban areas its a very high capacity solution at very little costs. I can easily beat fiber with this technology. It's finally an escape out of the overcrowded Wifi spectrum(s).

Before you start laughing at some post you might better check your knowledge. The one laughing last usually wins....

1). Major vendors like Netgear are working on the first indoor 60Ghz solutions. The disadvantage of no penetrating walls etc. can also work into a great advantage. No more interference from nearby competing wifi routers.

On 60 GHz you can have an interference free wireless network. The downside is, of course, you need an AP inside each room. So
the attenuation is indeed an advantage.

2). Attenuation makes 3 channels more then enough? How come I already have an issue in finding the proper channels in my 6x 60Ghz radio tower? It's that Metrolinq gives me one more frequency otherwise I had a problem....

The high attenuation is indeed an advantage because it eases frequency reuse. Highly directional beams make it more unlikely to
suffer problems. This is not a system to achieve long links but it solves a problem briliantly: relatively short range links with Gbps
speeds and interference free spectrum.

Are you having problems with that now? Given the narrow antenna beams used by these systems it seems unlikely to me? (Note, I am theorising!)
Maybe it would be a worthy experiment to hook three W60ap units on top of a mast and try.

3). All 802.11ad vendors claim distances up to 1,5km. Maybe you should read up a little bit more into the technology.

They have a longer range unit now, the "Dish" version. Of course it's the antenna what makes the difference. But that will only be suited to
point to point links. I guess one of those "Dish" units used as CPE would get a much longer range than 200 m connecting to a w60AP unit.

4). Like my side note on 1). Carriers or high-end solution providers are not the ones making 60Ghz a success technology. It's the bottom end (wifi at home/office) or WISP's that will. In urban areas its a very high capacity solution at very little costs. I can easily beat fiber with this technology. It's finally an escape out of the overcrowded Wifi spectrum(s).

At the end of the day, fiber offers an unlimited capacity at the cost of digging and laying them. The wireless spectrum has a limited capacity.

4). Like my side note on 1). Carriers or high-end solution providers are not the ones making 60Ghz a success technology. It's the bottom end (wifi at home/office) or WISP's that will. In urban areas its a very high capacity solution at very little costs. I can easily beat fiber with this technology. It's finally an escape out of the overcrowded Wifi spectrum(s).

At the end of the day, fiber offers an unlimited capacity at the cost of digging and laying them. The wireless spectrum has a limited capacity.

In my view, the sad thing about our civilization is that nobody wants to invest anything for the future. It's all about profits now.

Now PtP 60GHz offers whatever capacity is needed. Next year? What about next year? What is this "next year" anyway?

I think for now the 60Ghz products are meant to be for ptp deployments.

Sure you can use it for ptmp now, but with some limitations.

Maybe in the next few years we will have the option to select different channel widths @60Ghz

60 Ghz indeed works perfect for short range high capacity back haul links. We have a 200 mtr, a 205 mtr. a 305 mtr and a 410 mtrs link from IgniteNet running. These are absolutely interference free links that can easy transport the 200-400Mbps of internet traffic (80/20 D/U) we'd only see at peak times. The 410 meter link is tested with up to 1 Gb aggregated tcp traffic so we have plenty of spare.
Before we had 5 Ghz-40 Mhz links in bonding solutions doing the same with less capacity and higher latency in an otherwise 'overused' spectrum. Going to 80Mhz made things even worse.
60 Ghz has been proven our lifebuoy in our region and is definitely a great solution for us here. It kept my business alive.

At that same tower where we have these 4 links running off we now also fit 4 Mikrotik w60G-AP units to serve those clients that either are too close to the tower or see two synchronized Mimosa AP's in line of each other and had issues because of that. We also had to replace some Mimosa C5's for failures (their 48V PoE solution is vulnerable) and we found a 60G mikrotik CPE is actually cheaper then a Mimosa C5!

Vertical distances between these 60Ghz back hauls and now the AP's is 2 meters and we cover basically a 360 degrees area. On the moment we are populating these 4x 60º sectors (with beam forming!) and so far didn't run into issues. We only had to be very careful not to have the same 60Ghz channel of a link working in the same direction as one of the Mikrotik sectors. And since Mikrotik only had 3 channels available where Ignitenet has 4 it was a bit of a puzzle and trying to get it all too work.

The new Dish solution of MT can give us some 600 meter links too so now we are thinking of running more back hauls from that tower towards remote units. This is now still done with 5Ghz Airmax and Mimosa B5's or just Netmetals. With 60G hz back hauls from the corners of the building that has the tower and towards the perimeter of our building zone we could move away these 5 Ghz back hauls relatively cheap from our tower where we still have too many 5Ghz stations. We need 300 Mhz of spectrum while we have 3 more towers at short range and there are 4 more towers with 5 Ghz stuff from others in just 500 meter range....)

With 60Ghz we can interconnect all our towers without hassle or interference for relative low prices and we can deliver very high throughput to our customers. (Up to 200Mbps.)


So yeah, 60Ghz is for us a big solution into delivering high speed internet to our loyal customers. No matter if this is very short range of 500 meter range.
We can still deliver internet cheaper to our clients then the fiber competition and deliver the same speeds so up to now in the last half year and aggressive campaigning from those guys we'd only saw 0.5% of our clients opt for the new fiber solution. Probably they will lower their prices this year to get better results but by then we will just do the same...

Building networks into the future is nice but it needs survival of the present to make it....... We still have to make a profit!

They have a longer range unit now, the "Dish" version. Of course it's the antenna what makes the difference. But that will only be suited to
point to point links. I guess one of those "Dish" units used as CPE would get a much longer range than 200 m connecting to a w60AP unit.

As CPE they will go full speed at distances close to 700m

They have a longer range unit now, the "Dish" version. Of course it's the antenna what makes the difference. But that will only be suited to
point to point links. I guess one of those "Dish" units used as CPE would get a much longer range than 200 m connecting to a w60AP unit.

As CPE they will go full speed at distances close to 700m

Is this a promise, a laboratory result or 'real' field experiences? Are these units already in use by any? Do we have 'in the field' success stories that already can be told?

Today just got messages again from some regular MT suppliers in the EU that these units are not expected before mid June.
This in contrast to the MT promise that 'they are available' as of now. I'd wonder to whom......

Those are real field tests

Those are real field tests

Good! When can we finally buy them?
I mean, already saw the pictures in Venice, spring 2017.......

Carriers or high-end solution providers are not the ones making 60Ghz a success technology. It's the bottom end (wifi at home/office) or WISP's that will. In urban areas its a very high capacity solution at very little costs. I can easily beat fiber with this technology. It's finally an escape out of the overcrowded Wifi spectrum(s).


Interesting to hear that 4 x 60Ghz frequencies can be used at the same site,ie 3 x PtMP and 1 x PTP, did you try the APs back to back on the same frequency ?

Frequency reuse for us will be the key as we are planning a development of approx 50 x mini POPs each with 2 x PTP and 3 x APs all in 60Ghz ,Mini POPs will be approx 1000 metres apart,clients will connect using LHG60s,and sites will be interconnected using LHG60s.

The limit of 8 users per access point is workable but maybe future SW releases might increase that number which would be great.

We too are in a spectrum crowded area in urban coastal Southern Spain, with around 8 different WISPs in our area and fibre becoming more available,for sure the other WISPs will be looking to deploy the 60GHz and it will be interesting to see how that develops regarding interference,future development of GPS/Sync like the old Motorola Canopies could allow back to back frequency reuse and mitigate interference from other operators using synched Mikrotik 60Ghz.

there is several benefit from narrower freq chanell in p2p applications. all together using for example 500mhz it would be possible reach a noticeably longer distance (2500m for example) or more stable connections on lower distance especialy on rain conditions.Of course, all this would mean different hardware according to the above changes.

So far it all works out fine:

One tower:
4 x 60Ghz Metrolinq's backhauls running towards 200 - 400 meter remote towers. They do backhauling and deliver 200-800Mbps one way traffic what is plenty for us...

Same tower: 4 x 60Ghz Mikrotik AP's. Each has at least 2 clients connected, one actually has 5 now. They all run fine. We run speedtests to a CCR direct from the client's 60Ghz CPE and get 800-850Mbps download. If we'd run up and down the aggregated is slightly higher. Which is absolutely fine for us since even the highest contract client only has a queue for 200Mbps.....

I did a test on the 5 client 60Ghz AP and if a second unit runs the tcp bandwidth test both have to share this previously mentioned 800-850Mbps.
With 3 it is divided in 3, with 4 in 4 and with 5 in 5. Meaning that each of the five attached unit can still have some 150-170Mbps (it fluctuates a bit) download running at the same time as those others!
This is a situation in real never happens so I am very happy with this... (Normal contractual speeds are 50 or 100 or 200Mbps max. download speed)

The Mikrotik AP's are vertically separated by some meter each and have the 30 cm's mast in-between themselves. One meter above these 4 units we have 3 of the Ignitenets running off and at roof level (mast is on a house) we have the last ignite unit.

Off course we'd like to maintain the biggest possible separation between units but as shown here, 1 meter together with a bit smart spread of the channels make it possible to run 8 60Ghz devices on one tower with re-use of the channels.
A scan of the Mikrotiks don't see the Ignite units and vice versa. But we found one time we'd by mistake had one Mikrotik sector with exactly the same frequency as an ignitenet working in the same direction. The Ignitenet on the tower suffered from the Mikrotik client a lot. Although they couldn't 'see' each other, they do hurt each other under the right ("wrong") circumstances, which makes sense.

But running the scans on each of the branches to see if it 'sees' any of the other same branch units showed only in some instances that the unit could see 1 other device of the same make in 60Ghz.

Running a scan on a Mikrotik client only showed one other AP then the one he was suppose to connect to if the sector is coming close.

So my plan is now indeed to run more cells with 60Ghz. I think the idea of interlinking cells by the bigger 60Ghz units each some 600-800 meters apart and then 3 or 4 60Ghz sectors for the client connections would pretty much work fine in a dense urban area.

I am also developing a plan to do sort of similar but the AP's are Omnit-5ac's and we'd only connect clients up to 700meters distance max. With the higher modulations of 'ac' we can then also deliver 100+mbps connections to the clients and we'd use 60Ghz for the backhauling. (Leaving plenty of 5Ghz channels for the Omni's to make use of.) With the new LHG-type 60Ghz devices we should be able to have a 1-1,5km cell ratius without problems. Only during maybe the heaviest downpours the network might suffer but then people are probably watching out of the windows anyway instead of being 'online'....

Forgot to mention that if we would be able to 'split' the bandwidth of each channel 'in halve' or quarters, it would give us still even more flexibility. Given speeds at the present bandwidth are excessively more than what we now or the near future need.... (Can anybody show me a realistic example where a household would need a consistent 50, or 100Mbps flow of data.....?)

I am still not aware why Mikrotik only has 3 channels available where IgniteNet has 4? Both are in normal regulatory domain for Spain so is Mikrotik missing something here?

More channels, either by splitting or in absolute terms, would off course further increase the flexibility of 60Ghz.

The 60Ghz is performing so well, I think these guys I saw selling light or laserbeam based technology to interlink buildings in urban business districts must be scratching themselves behind the ears.....
If your rooftop is 40 meters wide you can run easy 6 x 60Ghz links to the other side of a, or some, streets to get Gigabits of capacity at the costs of less then one of their units.
They go down with rain, fog, snow and smoke, 60Ghz only goes down with a real heavy downpour...... When they loose one unit, the link is down. When one of the 6 60Ghz units goes down you only loose some 20% of your capacity. I know what I would do.....