We have a 900Mhz 6 AP cluster that is pretty much oversubscribed with SMs now. We are looking to towers close to off-load SMs and even the load.
What are everyone’s opinion on putting a 900Mhz omni 2.6 miles away? On the cluster we are using the standard 906, 915, and 924 frequencies. Both towers would be under GPS sync.
Depending on height and omni could be a bad idea. would make it a lot harder to coordinate channels with the other AP’s. How many people do you have on each ap?
On 4 of the APs we have between 70-85 SMs.
jesus. i wish we would get customer density like that.
One thing i forgot about as on option is that if available on your other site you could put up the 900 AP in the opposite polarization. yes it would require a truck roll, but you would be hogging less noise then currently.
Also out of these several hundred customers…how many are LOS? you could throw up a 2.4 or 5.7 omni and move people over that way also if there are enough to warrant it.
Yeah that’s what we’re leaning towards doing is putting up a 2.4 or 5.7 omni, or possibly (cash permitting) maybe trying one of those new PMP400 OFDM APs.
im really interested in the PMP400 stuff myself. We used to use alot of Alvarion VL gear and i saw some 5.8VL’s go through some stupid stuff a canopy 5.7 with a dish wouldnt even register with.
The problem is that PMP400 stuff isn’t cheap, so who knows if we’ll be able to try/play with it. 
yeah that why we quit using the VL stuff. just too damned expensive.
Don’t put an Omni that close, almost every situation it’s a really bad idea. You can put more 900 APs on the same tower (self noise on the Omni bad from the other tower and the ap sharing frequency will have a hard time hearing its SM close to that AP), if you’re using intergraded aps, you can put 3 full clusters on the same tower to balance out your load…
I wish we could get 75 ppl per AP, we lucky to get 40 without throughput issues
What percentage of the users have LOS/Semi-LOS to the towers?
I would imagine it’s a fairly good number - you could put up 3 2.4 or 5.x AP’s with Wireless Beehive Test adapters and 120deg sectors right on top of the 900 clusters and increase that tower capacity by 300 subs as well as offer a higher speed service for your power users.