Suggestions for new tower setup

cdemers · Sun Jul 09, 2006 9:41 pm

Greetings Everyone,

I have a few questions about a new tower i'm setting up and if it's going to be enough hardware.

I plan on using a RB/B4O unit with all 90 degree antennas, configured in the 5.x band each antenna on a different channel spaced 20mhz and seperate ssids. All bridged together into a single hotspot. Will the RB532 running at 333 be fast enough? Or should I probably split it between two of them? I want to try and get the maximum thoughput that I can, just concerned if a single unit is going to be fast enough to run all four R52's.

The backhaul is going to be a seperate RIC/522E, running the R52 in turbo

Equis · Mon Jul 10, 2006 11:42 am

Hello

How many clients are you expecting at any one time?

How many MBPS are you hopeing for?

cdemers · Mon Jul 10, 2006 12:50 pm

This is going to be a fairly high bandwidth tower, for now I will be assigning it two class C network blocks, so say 500 users, and I was planning also on assigning a second virtual AP on the radios for a second network block. As for MBPS, i'm hoping for 20-25 per radio or better, i know that one of the sectors won't be used as much as the others, just because of the topology of the area. All users will be run though the hotspot on the bridge interface so there will only be one hotspot for the 4 radios.

Thanks for the help.

Equis · Mon Jul 10, 2006 12:53 pm

I think you will need more power but I am no expert

maxfava · Mon Jul 10, 2006 4:22 pm

From my experience,
to have better bandwith use separate RB for each sector.

jarosoup · Tue Jul 11, 2006 12:00 am

Even with 4 separate APs (4x 90* sectors - highly recommended over 4 radios in one RB500) with perfect conditions and optionally nStream, I don't think you'll be able to achieve 500 clients. You might want to consider breaking up your network and adding some micro-POPs off your main tower.

cdemers · Tue Jul 11, 2006 2:18 am

Hi jarosoup and everyone,

How about if I scale the setup back to say 200, with the same hardware, do you think that would be a workable configuration?

Thanks everyone for your input.

Thinking after I get everything worked out and anyone else have any practical examples, it woud be good to summarize all the infor into the wiki as configuration examples of capabilities.

jarosoup · Tue Jul 11, 2006 4:48 am

Greetings

I haven't had a chance to load up a Mikrotik AP with 50 clients yet...so can't really comment on this much, but seems like it should be fine and I think others have come close to this..comments anyone? This would get you there if your clients are evenly spread around your tower (to balance between the 4 APs). You might want to consider finding an additional tower location for future use in the event that the majority of your cutomers end up only being able to connect to one of your APs - unless this isn't likely to happen in your location. Still, if you are considering a lot of bandwidth, it might be a good idea to look into it anyway.

I think it would be good to hear from some others who have had some experience with a lot of clients on a sinlge Mikrotik AP. Anyone?

Thinking after I get everything worked out and anyone else have any practical examples, it woud be good to summarize all the infor into the wiki as configuration examples of capabilities.

This would be nice to have...as well as what works, what doesn't, and some practical limitations (for ptmp) people have run into.

BrianHiggins · Tue Jul 11, 2006 5:09 am

i wouldn't even dream of that many users on one rb... ~20 users per AP just bridged to a vlan on ether1 for routing elsewhere by other hardware and 1 radio (using nstream with polling, on a sr5) my RB532's, set at 330MHz, are running at ~30% cpu constantly...

I dont think you should put more then 50 users to a AP, depending on traffic maybe less.

in my testing, a single RB532, regardless of the radio used, can only push at most 20mbps on wireless before it runs out of CPU power... however using nstream i have pushed a PC based system to 40mbps on wireless (using nstream dual, full duplex) the RB532's just don't have the CPU to handle large throughput's.

cdemers · Tue Jul 11, 2006 2:34 pm

Thanks everyone for your input, anyone else have anything they can add? I woudl like to know what is the maximum that people have run sucessfully, even if I run the CPU close to 100% or at 100% that's fine as long as things keep moving good.

maxfava · Tue Jul 11, 2006 3:11 pm

My trials with one RB532(330MHz) with two CM9 cards on board.

two clients with stanard G
One client connected to a CM9 and other to the second CM9.
Connection using pptp to the server behaind the RB.
RB has been used as routing and one time as bridge.

Downloading from an FTP server locate in the local network I can get max 22 mbit total.
This means that 1 card download a 11 mbit and the other card too, only using the pcq queue. CPu is about 90%

The same result if I connect both client to a single CM9.

If I connect one in Standard 802.11b and one 802.11g the total coninue to stay 22mbit. differents is that the 802.11g download at 18mbit and the 802.11b download at 4mbit.
If I connect the clients with different standard 802.11b and 802.11g to a single CM9 the total bandwith oscillate between 18mbit and 6 mbit.

That all. I think that the problem is not for CPU usage but for PCI bus bandwith or driver mikrotik. (in fact with nStreme it is possible to have 40 mbit).

cdemers · Wed Jul 12, 2006 2:27 pm

Thanks maxfava for your input.

Anyone else have any more configurations that they have tested that show what the maximum limit of the number of clients is within reason, running in the hotspot?

cdemers · Wed Jul 19, 2006 1:23 pm

Anyone else have any suggestions or input on this?

What have you guys done that has worked well?

Suggestions for new tower setup

Suggestions for new tower setup

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