1203 Washington got an equipment upgrade today. New radio link from IgniteNet and a dedicated router for the building from Mikrotik. This eliminates the shared link from Lookout Mountain and puts this building on our high-speed "on network".
Initial speed test to the building after installation:
This building now qualifies for our Full Throttle package.
As we continue to grow our footprint in downtown Golden, we have recently brought three new residential condo buildings online with Au Wireless. Welcome 1203 Washington, Prospector Place and Miners Point - all in the downtown corridor of Golden. In each of these buildings, we have brought in gigabit microwave (fiber speeds) and then use the building wiring to service individual condo units.
This allows us to provide very fast and reliable service to the units in that building. Installation times drop from around 2 hours for a home to 30 to 45 minutes for a condo unit and we can often schedule installs in the same week as you sign up because all the equipment is already on site and running.
For a while, we have been big fans of the RF Elements horn antenna. On our tower, we have replaced all the sectors with horns. However, on many of our mini-pop locations, we were using smaller omni antennas. This allowed us to only have to install one radio and keep the package fairly small.
On one of our mini-pops, we were having some interference issues as well as a couple subscribers that were shooting through a tree and performance was taking a hit.
There is the original install. Below is a section of the radio performance page to show you what that AP looked like from a signal perspective (you'll need to reference via IP address for comparison):
Couple of those subscribers were not doing so well and we were seeing a fair amount of interference issues (despite frequency selected) on the north side of town (to the right on the photo). In fact, some subscribers would not even associate with this antenna but others nearby would.
So, we decided to give the horns a try here. We pulled down the omni and put up a 60 degree horn facing north and a 70 degree horn facing more south / west. Most of the subscribers are to the north. That AP kept the same frequency and power settings - just a new antenna. The 70 degree horn is on an adjacent frequency now (GPS syncronized).
Here is what the radio performance looks like for the two radios. The radio with more subscribers is the north radio on the same channel and power as the omni was.
North 60 degree horn
New south facing 70 degree horn
Immediate improvement in signal, SNR and speeds to the subscribers. A couple subscribers that were no longer able to hit their speed package (with a TCP test) are now able to do so - just with a simple antenna replacement from omni to horn.
While omni's have a place (sometimes), we are getting away from them whenever possible and sticking with an antenna design that keeps working for us no matter where we install it.
We've been waiting for some time now (months) to really test out the Mimosa A5 platform. We have been waiting for the firmware that allows GPS sync. Since we run sync on all of our APs, it was not fair to test speeds on a non-synced platform vs a synced platform.
Well, Mimosa released firmware 2.2.1 which allows for a 50/50 split using GPS synchronization. We've had an A5-14 up for a while with 6 clients on it as our test. All the clients are well under 300 meters from the AP - most are within 100 meters.
The AP is connected to a 300 x 300 fiber line. We ran this test when there was no traffic on the AP so our test client was not competing with anyone else. Really trying to find a best case scenario.
AP is using frequency 5310 with a 40 Mhz width:
What the RF environment looks like
We used a C5 client that was around 75 meters from the AP with a clear shot at it. Here is what the AP reported for connection:
Nice clean signal, very low noise and great SNR. We have the full 8 MCS and showing 360 Mbps for PHY.
Now it was time to run some real world speed tests. We wanted to see results of what a customer would see running similar speed tests. One of these results is using a speed test hosted at our ISP, the others are 3rd party. All gave back similar results.
This was hosted by our ISP
3rd party hosted speed test
Netflix Fast.com result
For comparison, on our ePMP APs running in 50/50 mode, we are right around 110 Mbps x 110 Mbps. The upload is a bit faster than the Mimosa but the download is a little bit slower - by around 25 Mbps on average. We normally run the ePMP in 75/25 mode but that mode is not available yet for the Mimosa platform.
This is pretty close to being in line with Mimosa's claim that we should see ~250 Mbps aggregate throughput on a 40 Mhz channel with the A5.
This weekend, we installed the first half of the new licensed link that will service the Easley Rd neighborhood.
The larger white dish (without the logo) is the new radio. It is replacing the smaller dish with the orange "M" on it. As soon as the FCC gives us the go-ahead to turn it on, we'll start working on the far end. This will more than double our capacity into that neighborhood and will eliminate the interference we have been dealing with for the last few months.
When members contact us regarding slow or intermittent speeds inside their house, 99% of the time this is related to the wireless connection inside the house - from your router to your computer. There are a number of causes of this. The first thing we will ask is for you to plug your computer directly into the router and run a speed test. This will rule out the Internet connection almost all the time.
Read MoreIt was finally time to put a Mimosa A5-14 access point through its paces on the network. We wanted to test two different scenarios:
It's been a little while since we last updated our equipment. I know a number of smaller WISPs out there that have followed this. One of our goals as a co-op has been to provide as much information as possible to help others interested in this model deploy gear successfully. And, one of my motivations behind this is I like to test new gear. We have a very good working relationship with many of our vendors and as a result, get some test gear from time to time. Some of it works out great, some of it not so much, but we do deploy it all in a production environment and put it through the paces.
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Easley West mini-POP
The Easley West mini-pop is live and servicing members previously hidden by terrain and houses from the Easley East site. We have also upgraded equipment on both Easley Rd mini-pops and can now provide speeds up to 100 Mbps in the neighborhood.
Those of you in the Easley Rd area, you are getting a second antenna (mini-pop) site that will hopefully be coming on-line in early October. Installation began today on the members house that will serve as the new relay - which we are calling "Easley-West".
We are waiting on some additional equipment to arrive before we can turn on the mini-pop and start testing. This should double our capacity in that neighborhood and will likely serve as our last antenna site out there. We expect to be able to cover approximately 85% of the homes in that neighborhood.
