Categories
5G Mikrotik small cell Wireless WISP xISP

MUM 2019 presentation on 60GHZ with Justin Miller

Justin Miller and I were asked to do an impromptu presentation on 60GHZ at the US 2019 MUM.  This is what we threw together in an hour.  When John Tully asks you hop to. haha! Small Download

60ghz

Categories
5G small cell Wireless WISP

Small Cells and hybrid networks for WISPs: Part 1

Update. Due to some weirdness with a server move this article has been updated at http://blog.j2sw.com/2019/04/25/small-cells-and-hybrid-networks-for-wisps-part-1/

The never-ending goal of any Wireless Internet Service Provider (WISP) is how to get ever-increasing levels of bandwidth to clients. The always increasing demands, by customers,  on WISPs, and ISPs, in general, are becoming an everyday problem for many operators.  Building a business model on unlicensed spectrum can be a shaky foundation.  Interference and changing rules are just a few things which can influence how a WISP deploys services to a customer. Before we get into this, let’s take a step back and look at how many WISPs have been deploying services up until recently.

The “historical” WISP deployment has been to find the tallest structure around and locate some access points on it.  From there they try and reach out as far as they can to pick up customers.  This distance to the customer may be 3 miles, 5 miles, or even further depending on terrain. When an AP gets too full, you typically add a new one and make sure your antennas don’t overlap as much.   In the past installing customers at these distances has been fine for the 3, 5 and maybe even 10 meg packages which have been sold over the years.  However, the modern definition of broadband by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is 25 megabyte25 Megabits download by 3 Megabits upload. A good number of households are “getting by” with far less, but these customers need access to faster connections.

One way to meet this demand is to take a playbook from the cellular carriers. Small cells, or Micropops as many refer to them as can be a tremendous tool in your toolbox. For this series, I am going to refer to what I am talking about as a small cell and not a micro pop.  Why am I making this distinction? Small cells are something folks familiar with cellular operators understand.  This distinction may seem like such a small difference to you and me, but for the banker, or the city planner this could be a critical thing.  Many times you only have a small opening to present your case for deploying services to a neighborhood or other area.   This opening could be a twenty-minute meeting on a busy Monday or at a town hall meeting with 10 other things on the agenda.  Why not use terms which everyone is familiar with.

One way to increase data rates and modulation to clients is to decrease the distance they are from the Access Point (AP) and the number of clients on the AP.  Cleaner clients on an AP make for a better performing access point. The fewer obstructions you have to go through and even the less air you have to go through allows you to increase modulation to your clients on the AP.  If the clients are closer to the AP, they experience less interference. Imagine how many fewer things your AP hears if it is limited to a one-mile radius as opposed to a five-mile radius

So imagine your typical suburban neighborhood.  This may be a collection of houses in a subdivision within a 1-3 mile radius.

Typical single family home subdivision

Due to houses, terrain, and trees, you may not be able to service these homes with the needed 25meg downloads they are expecting from the historical setup I mentioned above. The tower is just too far awa and is going through too many things to scale to customer demand.

This problem is where the neighborhood small-cell can come in and solve.  Due to land and Home Owner Association (HOA) policies putting up the typical WISP tower is not feasible.  Many homeowners do not want industrial things cluttering up their views, even if it means delivering the high-speed internet they are wanting. Towers can bring down property value.  In our photo above, several poles or small towers ranging from 40-80 feet would be inconspicuous enough to blend in with the neighborhood.

Small Cell on a Pole

Each of these poles may service as many as 20-30 homes. This small customer count per AP keeps the customer count on the AP low, so you are not oversubscribing the Access Points, and also allows each customer to have the max signal to their nearest AP. Due to customers reliance on speed test servers, being able to provide what you sell is critical.  If you are selling 200 meg packages, then the customer should be able to run a 200 meg speed test. In an earlier article, I talk about the problems with speed test servers, but your customers want to get what they expect.

So now that we know why small cells are essential to a WISP, our next articles in this series will focus on the technical aspects of small cell, integrating them into your existing infrastructure, and showing deploying them is not really that scary, hard or expensive.

Categories
Uncategorized

Small Cell Setup

Small Cell setup on a utility pole.

#5g #smallcell #wifioffload

Categories
5G epmp FlashBriefing iOT LTE podcast TBW Wireless WISP

Flash briefing

Tower One Spring show
Tower one is kicking off its early spring road tour with the following stops to conduct tower safety and rescue training. If anyone would like to join any of these classes feel free to contact us at: sales@toweroneinc.com

March 26-27th Upland, Indiana
April 8-9th Lasara, Texas
April 10-11th Lasara, Texas
April 16-17th Mitchell, Nebraska
April 18-19th Albuquerque, New Mexico
April 22-23rd Amarillo, Texas
April 24-26th Iola, Kansas
April 29-30th Salisbury, Missouri
May 1-3rd Terre Haute, Indiana

Comcast FLEX offering
https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/21/18276040/comcast-flex-streaming-announced-features-pricing

TMOBILE LTE
https://bgr.com/2019/03/21/t-mobile-home-internet-service-details/

Microsoft says FCC overstates broadband
https://www.pcgamer.com/microsoft-says-fccs-broadband-report-overstates-high-speed-availability/

FCC resolves some WHITESPACE petitions
https://www.multichannel.com/news/fcc-resolves-white-spaces-issues

Categories
5G

Verizon 5G Page

Verizon has some information on their 5G rollout, including cities and the new Motorola Phone.

https://www.verizonwireless.com/5g/phones/

Verizon’s 5G to launch first in Chicago and Minneapolis on April 11

 

Categories
FlashBriefing podcast Uncategorized

Flash Briefing: 5G, Speedtest pi, forums

Flash Briefing for March 15 2019

BGP hacking and prevention
https://radar.qrator.net/blog/eliminating-traffic-hijacking_36
Talks about

Make a raspberry pi speedtest box

5G Conference in Orlando Florida in May
https://www.telecompetitor.com/implementing-the-next-generation-of-wireless-broadband-has-huge-implications-for-the-entire-communications-industry/

https://www.connectivityexpo.com/conference/

Upcoming Conferences
Wispamerica
Mikrotik User Meeting (MUM) April 4th and 5th
CHI-NOG May 23rd
Indiana xISP meeting May 16th. More details to come

Looking for a different perspective on XISP stuff? Check out the DSLReports forums
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/wisp
There is also a forum for ISPs.
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/isp2isp There is a fair amount of spam in this one, but can have some interesting topics.

#bendinglight #routinglight #routingrf #sneakernet

Categories
Tower Uncategorized Wireless WISP xISP

ALG Antenna test vs Jirous dishes

The following are results from a series of tests of AGLcom’s parabolic dish antennas on an existing link that is 5.7 miles long. The link typically passes 80-90Mbs with a TX capacity of 140 Mbs and radios used are Ubiquiti AF5X operating at 5218 Mhz.  A full PDF with better Readability can be downloaded here..

The tests were taken in stages:

  1. 1)  The normal performance of the link was recorded.
  2. 2)  The 2′ dish at one end, B, was replaced with the AGLcom, C, dish and the link reestablished.The link performance was recorded.
  3. 3)  The 2′ dish at the other end, A, was replaced with the AGLcom, D, dish and the link reestablished. The link performance was recorded.
  4. 4)  The setting on the AF5xs were adjusted to optimize the link performance with data recorded.
  5. 5)  The 2′ dish, B was put back in the link and the performance was recorded.
  6. 6)  The ACLcom C was put back into place.

The tables below do not follow the test order as the third line of data was actually the last test performed.

Antennas:

A-Jirous JRC-29EX MIMO
B-Jirous JRC-29EX MIMO C-AGLcom – PS-6100-30-06-DP D-AGLcom – PS-6100-29-06-DP-UHP

Results:

Table 1 is the signal strength results of the various dishes on the link. The first line, A-B, is the original Jirous to Jirous. A is the first two columns of the link and are the A side and the last two columns are the B side on the link. What is of interest is that exchanging B to C in the second line brought the signal deviation between the channels to only 1db and 0 db as seen in Table 2. The third line was a result of replacing the horn on the A dish and optimizing the setting on the AF5X radios. This changed the signal by around 7db and improved the link capacity, Table 3. Clearly, the A dish had a problem with the original horn.

In the fourth line, D-B, the signal strength improved as well at the signal deviation on the two channels, Table 2 first two columns. This link was not optimized. The fifth line, D-C is both AGLcom dishes which improved the bandwidth, Table 3, and the signal deviations, Table 2. The final line, D-C, was the previous line optimized. The signal strengths moved closer together and the bandwidth improved.

Link Ch0 Ch1 Ch0 Ch1

  1. A-B  -73 -76
  2. A-C  -73 -74

A*-C -64 -66

  1. D-B  -63 -62
  2. D-C  -62 -62

D*-C -60 -60

-70 -74 -71 -71 -65 -66 -59 -59 -58 -58 -61 -61

Signal Strength (* optimized data) Table 1

Table 2 has four data columns, the first two being the measured results and the latter two being the measured difference from theory. The Jirous and AF5X calculators were used for the theory signals. Clearly the signal approached the theoritical limit with the optimization and with the change of dishes. The optimization improved the signal by ~9db for the link that we replaced the horn on the Jirous and by ~2db for the AGLcom link.

Link dSig dSig A-B 3 4 A-C 1 0 A*-C 2 1 D-B -1 0 D-C 0 0 D*-C 0 0

dSig dSig -16.5 -17.4 -17.0 -15.0 -8.0 -9.0 -13.3 -5.3 -7.0 -4.3 -5.0 -6.0

Signal strength variation from theory Table 2

The band width improvement was more obvious, Table 3, from 22 Mbs to 39 Mbs for the RX and 144 Mbs to 141 Mbs TX for the link with the horn replacement. The bandwidth improvement for the optimization of the AGLcom link was from 61Mbs to 66Mbs RX and from 211Mbs to 267Mbs for TX.

The bandwidth improvement from the original, optimized link to the AGLcom link is from 61Mbs RX to 67Mbs and from 210Mbs TX to 267Mbs. There is a clear improvement for the AGLcom link over the Jirous link.

Link BW-RX

  1. A-B  22.5
  2. A-C  39.0

A*-C 60.9

  1. D-B  61.4
  2. D-C  60.6

D*-C 66.6

BW-TX 144.6 141.4 210.0 211.0 215.0 267.6

Table 3

Conclusions:

The data supports a measurable improvement in both signal strength and bandwidth with the use of the AGLcom dishes. However, it is difficult to quantify the improvement. The Jirous dishes were identical whereas the AGLcom dishes were not. One of the jirous dishes was under performing initially but was repaired for the last tests. Additional testing is needed to provide accurate data analysis and performance comparison. The best performance tests would involve identical AGLcom dishes, ideally two links, one each of both types of dishes.