- If you are planning to use two antennas one for TX and one for RX, then you will have to use Dual-Nstreme, but for dual-nstreme you will need a bigger CPU, I have read some post of people being able to use RB532's to achieve daul-nstreme but according to the manual and to my own personal experience, dual-nstreme is going to top your CPU, you are mentioning it is peaking 100% usage already, so I believe that is going to get worst.
I kinda solved the 100% peak usage with my new link topology, it looks like WDS with 2 radio modules was overcharging my routerboards
- I believe WDS is not going to work on dual-nstreme
Yeah, true that
But I was thinking to move to a "routed" solution, instead of a WDS based one
That is a good idea, specially if you have more than a hundred customers.
- As I suggested on my first post on this thread, Have you already tried your setup without customers connected? Results?
Yes, it is about 6-8ms with some 40ms peaks (randomly).
- Have you checked for Broadcast on your network?
Not really, would you tell me how to? Thank you
, please read broadcast, multicast and unicast, ask Mr. Google or Mr. Wikipedia, also do a little research on domain broadcast and MAC domain, on IP networks. (If you route your broadcast domain wil get split into smaller ones, which is good), routing has it's advantages in certain circumstances, but bridging has its own on certain circumstances, its all a matter of planning according to your growth ratio.
- Do you have ANY kind of filter on your AP's or edge router in order to DROP FORWARDED annoying packets like 135-137 UDP/TCP , TFTP, RPC, NEtbus, backOrifice, excesive pings.?
Yes, I had that, but I when I had queues or packet marking/filtering rules active on the AP, winbox stopped listing MAC addresses from Winbox login screen
I had to disable them
Do you know anything about this?
mmm check on the mac domain thing mentioned before ....
- Do you have somewhere in your network a way to "control"/drop excesive connections?
Not yet, how much connections per user do you think would be a good value? Well this will depend on the "size" of your customer, but a very rough guess will be around 10-20 connections per PC on your customer's network.
- Do you have somewhere in your network a way to "limit"/drop P2P connections?
I'm handling all p2p and bandwidth shaping on my PPPoE server, which is between the end point of my radio link and my internet gateways. I think that's not helping much with radio links, since the control is "too far away" from the AP, don't you think? But still, because of the winbox problem, I can't enable those on the AP.
First of all IT WILL HELP no matter where it is located in your network, as a matter of facts the P2P transactions are going to be between your customers and the internet, so having those kind of filters @ your gateway definitively will work.
If your winbox can not show MAC address ... mmmh ... make a list and reach your gear thru IP, if you have dhcp make a static bind MAC to IP .
- Have you tried with a sniffer to "see" what's going on through your links?
A lot of traffic is going on in there
Do I have to look for something specific? Use an external sniffer like Iris or something similar, attach a HUB (not a switch, 'cuse the broadcast domain thing mentioned before) between your network (the part you want to sniff) and look for excesive broadcast packets (255.255.255.255, or , FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF)
There are several things that can be causing this, you need to dig into it, there is no magical solution when this kinf of weird thing starts to happen. But going dual-nstreme on your setup will not solve anything.
Please read Mikrotik's WIKI on firewall section, lot of tips and clues there.
I was really hoping that doubling bandwidth would help
I doubt it, I believe you DO NOT have a bandwidth problem but if you are in doubt use THE DUDE and measure and graph your bandwidth on a per link basis, ....
And please for all means upgrade to the latest RouterOs version and UPGRADE your Routerboards BIOS and increase CPU speed to highest available there.
Hope this helps you...
Best Regards
Jorge Boardman
Following some forum user advice, I'm already updating all my equipment's software to latest version (2.9.46)! Most of my bridges/APs are 2.9.35 while many CPEs are 2.9.27 or less!
Ah, what about Routerboard BIOS? So that's a separate thing from RouterOS update, does this REALLY help?
NO, the BIOS upgrade is already included into the RouterOSpackage.npk, just after installing the latest version of routerOS, open a new terminal in your winbox go to /system routerboard then issue a print command, and you will see your current BIOS version and the new available version, just issue a upgrade command and ask yes when prompted, that simple it is... it's on the manual. =)
One last thing: all my 532A are at 266Mhz. Do you think would be safe pushing them to 333Mhz?
YES it is completely safe I have several 266's running at 333 w/o a problem, and several 333 running at 400 ....
Thank you very much for your attention and for your help, I really appreciate that.
If I set my AP Data Rate to 6Mbps ONLY, does that mean that each client can get to 6Mbps or that the WHOLE bandwidth is 6Mbps (the sum of all clients)?
I've updated my first post with the correct topology 
