We are having some trouble with throughput on our various ap's. We are running RB411a's with 140 horizontal sectors on a 250ft tower. We have approximately 30 clients on each sector. Radios are configured with Nstreme and polling on, and WDS using radius. We are in the 2.4/10mhz frequency for clients and the tower is limited to 36 Mbps. Radio has an AR5212 Card. The maximum throughput we ever see on an ap is around 4 megs. If I turn off all clients but one, I can push 12 Megs through the ap, but with two it drops by about 25%, and with 3 or more the maximum throughput seems to drop to 4 Megs.

I have a wireless bridge with a similar configuration, except that I use the 2.4 GHz Turbo Band. I ran a bandwidth test and reached 76-77 Mbps with UDP, and 10 Mbps less with TCP. I tried the 10 MHz band and I was not impressed, so decided to run Turbo G instead. Can you post some screenshots from winbox, advanced and status tab of your wireless cards?

The clients will be Mikrotik CPE right? Dont limit the data rates at the tower, leave the tower unset, and set at the client side - do this by testing the various rates 12/18/24/36 and set each client with the rates that get the best throughput.

This will help resolve your issue largely.

If you are using 4.x, try downgrading to 3.x. Nstreme appears broken in 4.x

Thanks for the suggestions. We have only limited our towers to 36. All clients are manually configured as suggested to get optimal ccq. We are using OS 3.30 with wireless test package 3.3 as well. I have been doing some testing on a lighter loaded AP as well. Using 5 clients as a test bed I have been attempting to max out the ap, but I cannot get past the 4mb throughput wall when I have 3 or more clients downloading data. This becomes unbearable with 33 clients! We use usermanager to set our upload download rates so those settings are done on the cpe side as well. For the most part our AP's are doing no processing at all. No firewall (this is on the client as well), no bandwidth metering. Is anyone running a similar setup for a small wisp? How many clients are you supporting per AP? What data rates are you able to provide the customer?

Are you using 3.30 with nstreme with the wireless-test package?

run wireless-test package for PtMP applications.