Hi,

I'm currently looking at setting up a fairly high performance wireless network to distribute high speed internet in a village of about 120 households. Maybe only 50 or so want connecting at most; digging the roads up etc is not viable cost-wise so I'm looking at wireless. Naturally, Mikrotik springs to mind. I've got no significant experience with wireless outside of some fairly small deployments and a fair bit of office/broadcast link experience.

The place is a very linear place - see http://goo.gl/maps/94Eg - so I'm considering a few sector antennas to the south (no more than 600m away), at a reasonable height (20, maybe 30 feet), to split the coverage up between devices/frequencies. Ideally everything would be 5GHz and in terms of throughput I'm aiming for in excess of 50Mbps usable per client (upstream bandwidth will be 1-2Gbps) using 40MHz channels. An alternative might be omnidirectional antennas in a few spots through the village, but these probably wouldn't be able to be placed particularly high up. There's quite low density of housing and lots of space/trees/buildings between things, which will undoubtedly cause issues.

Does this sound like a sensible approach? And if so, what should I be looking at for CPEs and for driving the sectors/backhaul? I'm thinking currently SXT G-5HnDs for CPEs, plus RB750GLs for those who want an internal router, RB2011LS-INs as upstream routers and fibre interfaces to the backbone, and RB433GLs with R52Hn cards for the sectors.

Bit of a grassroots project here - desperately trying to pull our village's internet out of the dark ages! Any advice or tips would be appreciated. Sadly we seem to be entirely devoid of WISPs/system integrators in the middle of Oxfordshire...

Why do you need a local installer? Its a specialist project to do it right, so you are unlikely to have someone on your doorstep, but we are around and travel UK (and World) wide.

Some observations:

Don't use 52n cards, if you can find dedicated 5ghz cards you will be better off as you lose around 3db on the 2/5 circuitry.

If lots of trees, you may have problems with your backhauls, LOS is pretty much required for good speed. RB751G may be a better internal router over the RB750 as it has built in WiFi, and despite the few users with problems, they do work very well for us (over 200 in the field)

Make sure you disable default forward on the wireless cards

Use NV2 between CPS and Sectors.

Use separate APS for the Sectors, each in its own enclosure, don't try to save a few pounds using 1 board with multiple cards. It may work, but never as well.

regards

Why do you need a local installer? Its a specialist project to do it right, so you are unlikely to have someone on your doorstep, but we are around and travel UK (and World) wide.

Local isn't required, but might well be for the cost - we're looking at lower than £300 per house for the whole shebang, which doesn't leave a lot of room for paying contractors, sadly. This is being done off the back of the UK rural broadband grants which really don't cover much, annoyingly. Plus some cash is being provided for the backhaul by interested parties. We'd really like to do it via someone like you, if the finances work - if you're interested, drop me a PM, I'll put you in touch.

Some observations:

Don't use 52n cards, if you can find dedicated 5ghz cards you will be better off as you lose around 3db on the 2/5 circuitry.

Fair point - dedicated 5GHz makes sense.

If lots of trees, you may have problems with your backhauls, LOS is pretty much required for good speed. RB751G may be a better internal router over the RB750 as it has built in WiFi, and despite the few users with problems, they do work very well for us (over 200 in the field)

There's not a huge number of trees but LOS is the aim for everything. RB751G isn't a significantly more expensive router so makes sense, yeah.

Make sure you disable default forward on the wireless cards

Naturally - I'm still figuring out what the network will look like in terms of structure to let us do bandwidth sharing across the 50-120 clients off these sectors. Ideally anyone would be able to use 100% of the bandwidth if nobody else is using it - obviously with a 2Gbps backhaul from the sectors, no 200Mbps link will ever do this, but 200Mbps should be usable if there's spare capacity; however this has to be done upstream of the three sectors, obviously, which I'm still a little unsure about. Sticking PCQ on the backhaul router for all traffic should do the trick, right? (Possibly using queue trees to prioritise email/http over other traffic)

Use NV2 between CPS and Sectors.

Yup, of course.

Use separate APS for the Sectors, each in its own enclosure, don't try to save a few pounds using 1 board with multiple cards. It may work, but never as well.

regards

Yeah - apart from anything else I'm planning to have a bit of overlap between sectors and the multiple cards will add a degree of redundancy. And I imagine it'll make the cabling a little easier, being able to put each sector/board up independent of the others.

Thanks for the advice!

Since you have done the site survey, come up with deployment plan pictorially (Sketchs) and will be able to input greatly to make it worth while.

I hard a similar deployment covering a region of about 3 sqauare km with about 40,000 users on wifi. I use mikrotik throughout for ease of management. But at some point I have to create a three (3) fibre node at about 1km away as my backhaul and everything has been working fine. The only challenge i have was interference from multiple aps. And this was because each mikrotik interface cannot acomodate more than 40 users. At best 30 or less.

I will like to see your deployment diagram.

...................................... The only challenge i have was interference from multiple aps. And this was because each mikrotik interface cannot acomodate more than 40 users. At best 30 or less.

30 or less ????????, what bandwidth are you giving to each client, are you using NV2

We have a decent deployment with a few thousand users and ser 30-35 as the max even with full rate and good ccq once we hit 40 things slow right down even undet a low traffic load.

We have a decent deployment with a few thousand users and ser 30-35 as the max even with full rate and good ccq once we hit 40 things slow right down even undet a low traffic load.

Interesting.

How many users can you get per sector? Are you using MIMO or TDMA?

I'm currently looking at a RB711GA-5HnD plus an Ubiquiti 90 degree sector pairing for each radio stack, with 3 in total covering the village from end to end, mostly <1km links, 16m high mast to put them on to clear most trees and houses. In theory I can then run 2x2 MIMO on the sectors with NV2 for better reliability. SXT G-5HnD will be my CPE gear along with an internal router.

I'm hoping with this setup (I'll have maps soon, still planning best placement in my eyes before I throw some stuff up) I can get about 40 users per sector and maintain good (minimum 30Mbps) service for each link, even without perfect LOS (fresnel zone intrusions from trees etc). I'll be bridging everything back to a central router (RB2011) which will then do bandwidth management and user management. If nobody's seeing any major issues with this I'm going to get enough gear to validate it in practice and test some locations, see how it does.

Hope you don't really mean bridging !

You should look at a decent routed topology, potentially using pppoe for client routers.

Hope you are aiming to buy from us, happy to provide advice and info.

Nick.

Hope you don't really mean bridging !

You should look at a decent routed topology, potentially using pppoe for client routers.

Hope you are aiming to buy from us, happy to provide advice and info.

Nick.

Probably more sensible, yeah - need to figure out all the details. Will be getting a complete set of bits to do an on-the-bench setup and test and I'll play around with the routing/topology stuff at that point, doing things purely off documentation just does my head in sometimes

(And yeah, we'll almost certainly be getting some gear from LinITX - what's the lead time on getting in bits of gear you've not got listed on the site on the RB front?)

Stock is due in today, as soon as UPS arrives....

We aim to carry the full range of MikroTik products.

If there is something specific you are looking for which we don't have then let us know.

Nick.

We are using NV2 with a WDS setup so each ap is a bridge and each pop/tower has a router so our layer two does not extend past the pop/tower the client is connected to.

In this topic and all otheres like this, everyone is talking how much costumers can be on one interface (30 or less, 50 max, etc...).
No one is talking about bandwith we need to give to our costumers per interface.
I can have 200 costumers with 1kb of speed on one antenna and also I can't have 10 costumers with 20mbit speed simoultaneuslly.
Number of users without speed of costumers and vice versa isn't information which can lead to solution.

In this topic and all otheres like this, everyone is talking how much costumers can be on one interface (30 or less, 50 max, etc...).
No one is talking about bandwith we need to give to our costumers per interface.
I can have 200 costumers with 1kb of speed on one antenna and also I can't have 10 costumers with 20mbit speed simoultaneuslly.
Number of users without speed of costumers and vice versa isn't information which can lead to solution.

Indeed - we're aiming for 100Mbps or higher per user, as fast as they can if they're uncontested, with bandwidth management on the sectors and core router to share it all out evenly, down to a minimum speed of 10Mbps per user. But you have to have that information to do a lot of the planning.