At this site I decided on doing ABAB channel layout to minimize spectrum use and increase coverage service range. I am co-located with AT&T and Sprint. We will operate in both 2 GHz for nLOS and 5 GHz for LOS and much higher bandwidth offerings.
An interesting challenge to this installation was power. We had no reasonable way to provide utility AC power at the top and running 12+ cat5 (4x backhauls and 8x APs) up the building was simply out of the question. As Nextel had vacated the location, the property owner gave us permission to use their equipment to our desire. We decided on using one run and carrying 24vdc to all of our equipment at the top - one little box for switching, routing, power and sync. All equipment is using the same power source.
We have finally put our first customer on this tower. At 7 miles in the 5.1 GHz band the customer was getting these speeds very consitently:
As i understand the benefit of using 2 AP's of ePMP is fault tolerant on Sector and/or double the number of SM's you can attach without the need to reserve more space on tower.
Goog too for migrate existing customers with other solutions from Ubiquiti or Mikrotik to ePMP.
The two APs on the one sector is dual band - 2 and 5 GHz. 2 goes to nLOS customers where 5 doesn't work. I have 5 GHz at 20 MHz channel to double AP capacity (2 GHz is 10 MHz) which gets me upwards of 100 megs aggregate. Dual band sector means less vertical real estate consumed.
We are putting customers on this tower now, I can only assume they're all doing Netflix =)
I'm using 75/25 split. I do this so I can sync (if you do flexible mode you can't sync!!!)
The battery pack is home made. I made it out of steel and JB weld. I got the switch on top from a local electronics store so I can switch between polarities. The voltage is just straight off the battery, which is 18v. I've used it for many brands of equipment successfully.
We have had nothing but bad luck with IT Elite sectors. Actually just got done pulling some more down from our towers. We have seen signals improve up to 10dbi just by purchasing a higer quality antenna. I can't speak for the one you are using as we have not tried it. The specific antenna I am talking about is this onehttp://www.itelite.net/en/Katalog/24-GHz-80211-bg//SECTOR24015dual-HV.html . To be fair we use a fair amount of thier cpe antenna's with no problems. Just giving you a heads up in case you don't see signal levels where you think they should be.
On the flip side let us know if they seem to work out well, as it is a very cool antenna if they do!
No noise with Sprint or AT&T, at least I haven't had any problems. The tech that was working to activate Sprint's gear was there the other day to light up their LTE right as we finished.
The sectors are all dual linear. There is no slant anywhere. Note that the OEM sector is slant while the integrated CPEs are still linear (it seems backwards, but they decided to do that).
The 5 GHz end of things I've been very happy (as noted in the first post as far as distance, speed).
Josh, how do these compare to UBNT, we are considering a migration ourselves, determining whether EPMP is a better path then the new UBNT gear sets. Voice quality/throughput/scalability are what we are after.