AP Settings

I have 42 900 AP’s, there is a configuration setting I don’t quite understand fully.

The “Radio” tab has a place to enter Downlink Data %.
The “QOS” tab has fields to enter the specific Sustained and Bursts speeds for Uplink and Downlink
On our 900 gear the cumalative “Sustained Uplink” and “Sustained Downlink” must be under or equal to 40,000kbps.

My question is which setting overrides the other?
The “Downlink %” on the “Radio” tab, or the actual settings in the “QOS” tab.

Several of my AP’s are maxing out with 50-60 subscribers. I am trying to maximize the capability of the AP’s.

Currently my “Download %” is set ot 80% on all AP’s
The QOS settings are 20,000 for Sustained Uplink and Sustained Downlink.

Do those setting conflict with each other?
Wondered what some of you are doing with those three settings.

Thanks in advance,

Reay

The Download Data % is a portion of the actual airtime. So if you have a good 2X link, 80% will give you ~3.2 Mbps down and ~ 800 kbps up. However if the signal is crappy and the 2X link only runs at about 3 Mbps it will scale back as per that ratio. So 2.4 Mbps down and 600 kbps up.

if you set your QOS download speed to 3000 Kbps it will get capped at that - you won’t sacrifice upload airtime to satisfy an upload rate.

Your settings currently give everyone 20 Mbps symmetric. No big surprise they’re eating all your bandwidth :slight_smile: I would trim it down to your service offering. For instance, we sell a standard package of 1.5/512. Add in a bit of bursting and I find it works pretty well. For poorer links I apply a lower profile so that they cannot eat up all of the airtime at 1X either.

salad,

Thanks for your reply.
These Ap’s are all 900 Mhz and as I understand, they will only do 3Mbs anyway.
If I am following you correctly, you would recomend a setting that would add up to 3Mbs ie; 2.5Mbs down and 500K up?

Almost all my customers are residential so, upload speed is normally not critical.
I am looking to maximize the download capability by sacrificing some upload bandwidth.

I am hust trying to buy time here while we look at adding some 2.4 hardware on the same towers in order to shed some of the load off the heavy loaded AP’s. We think we might be able to move 15-20 customers off each AP with a LOS 2.4 system.

Reay

Set the SM sustained to the customer’s subscribed speed, and set the burst to 16000kb down/8000kb up (2MB down/1MB up).

If you are bridged, make sure you are blocking ports
- PPPoE
- SMB (Network Neighborhood)
- SNMP
- Bootp Client
- Bootp Server
- IPv4 Multicast

Also if you are using v 8.2.7 or later, enable Broadcast/ Multicast Uplink Data Rate to 5-15k we don’t do DHCP so we set it to 5kbps - others say 15k was needed.

Try to run as many SM’s in 2X as you can. This gets the same data across in half the time. Higher data/time = more over subscription.

Thank you Jerry,

I’d hoped you would weigh in.

I have the SM’s at 3000 down burst, 1000 up burst, 1500 sustained and 512 sustained.
We have always blocked or filtered your suggested list of protocols.

Currently we have the Broadcast/Multicast …disabled.
You think that will help? What is it, if you don’t mind?

What are your thoughts on the Downlink %?

Reay

Broadcast limit simply caps the uplink broadcast traffic in case something goes haywire. It will only help if you are having alot of uplink broadcast traffic which you probably are not.

Canopy 900 seems to be most efficient at 75% DL. 2X is going to give you the biggest improvement. Also make absolutely sure every 900 AP in your network is configured with the same DL%, Ctrl Slots, and Max Distance. All it takes is one AP causing interference to increase packet retries and use up bandwidth.

Also, play with Control Slots. You will find that too few will increase contention and give users the feeling that the network is slow. The suggested # of slots by Moto seems to be light to me. However, too many can result in less available bandwidth. You have to play with it.

Adding the 2.4 will give you the ability to go to 100+ users per AP giving you alot of added capacity.

You can also greatly expand your network capacity by BW shaping traffic. All it takes is a couple of power users running torrents to suck up an AP’s BW capacity.

We started at 75% DL and as the SM counts started reaching +50 I changed to 80% and set all AP’s up to 3 control slots.
All AP’s have same DL%,Slots and Max dis. You taught me that a couple of years ago.
I put all SM’s with -50 to -60’s in 2x mode. Any lower sig strength, seemed to cause issues in 2x for our area anyway.

We have such an issue with pine trees and hills, we will have very few with LOS for the 2.4.

Your are right about the Power Users. There are only five or so customers on these affected AP’s but, they are BW hogs.

I got into the habit of watching their usage in Prizm and if I see more than four hours of 1.5 to 2Mbs continuos use, I back their sustained rate down. I have a few that I have had to bring down to 750 and 128. Just to free up the AP.

I had one complain last week about slowness. As it turned out he was the biggest BW hog on that AP and had been so for the last 30 days.

I quickly informed him that he was the heaviest user and that if he was not satisfied with the service, I would release him immediately from his contract and would be more than happy to come retreive the equipment that day.
He never wrote back!

Thanks for all your help Jerry.
I guess I’m just going to have to rush in some 2.4 hardware and hope for the best.

Reay

I got this response from a MOTO Engineer upon asking about tower configurations.

He states that due to service area noise floor, many WISP’s set up 6 900 AP’s on a " two frequency plan", set up the following way.

AB,AB,AB

Using say 906 and 915 freqs when 924 is not usable when the typical setup of ABC,ABC will not work.

He recomended a new config that would alow adding up to three more AP’s on the same tower with no vertical seperation to enable reducing load on the first six AP’s.

AB,AB,AB
C , C, C

With the “C” radio’s on 924 freq.

He went on to state that if the “C” radios remained 120 degrees apart they could be added as long as sync was employed to all AP’s.

The CMM’s I have will not allow for 9 AP’s plus BH’s and I really don’t need to add that many. I just need to add 1 or 2 more to move some load around.

If the AB,AB,AB, setup works, then adding the C AP’s right below them should not be an issue.

Has anyone out there tried this?
If so, how did it go?

Reay