Sorry for the long post but here goes, I really need the help.

I have multiple 180' towers in a very mountainous region serving wireless internet to residential and commercial customers. Most of the towers have 2 or 3 sectors on channels 1, 6 and 11. The access points that we have been using are the Proxim AP-500 and the AP-1000, the issue with these is that I cannot host more than 20/25 people per channel before I start to get bad throughput and lots of packet loss.

I decided to try to build myself a MiktoTik AP using an old PC with 3 PCI wireless cards; 1Ghz P4, 384Mb RAM, 3 Engenius EPI-3601S PCI Cards and using a RP-SMA to N-Male pigtail to tie them all into the LMR-400 going up to the 90 degree antennas.

My problem is while trying to host the same number of customers on the Mikrotik I get wayyyyy more packet loss and throughput problems. Is there anything that I'm doing wrong or that I need to be doing to try to at "least" get the same performance as a lower quality, IMO, AP-500?

The AP is a basic bridge between my wireless and wired network. If I'm going about this all wrong please let me know, call me stupid, anything

Attached is my exported config file.

Please help

Paste /sys reso irq pr

I had removed one of the wireless cards and move one of the channels back to an AP-500 to do some tests.
What are you looking for here if I may ask?
/sys resource irq pr
IRQ OWNER
1 [i8042]
6 [floppy]
8 [rtc]
14 IDE 1
15 IDE 2
16 [uhci_hcd:usb2]
18 [uhci_hcd:usb4]
19 [uhci_hcd:usb3]
19 ether1
20 [acpi]
21 wlan1
22 wlan2
23 [ehci_hcd:usb1]

If You have same irq on 2 cards (ex. wlan and eth, wlan and wlan) You can have quality problems. Look back on this menu with 3 cards.

Okay, IF the IRQ does overlap, is their anyway software way of changing that? Bios config?


If thats not the issue did anyone notice a problem with my config file?

I have the HW retries set to a lower number, 4-6, to try to get the latency down and the frame-lifetime set to around 10. I've lurked these forums forever trying to find some answers but no luck so far.

My biggest question is if I'm doing the whole setup correctly. Is this what most people would do, bridge the interfaces, set the channels and go?

Once again, thanks for your help.