Does 2.4GHz makes sense?


@giuseppe4 wrote:
Does 2.4GHz sectors make sense?

Hi.  Well, I can tell you this from our own experience.  We run a couple thousand non-Cambium 2.4Ghz radios on our towers. These older non-Cambium radios work OK(ish) in the country, but they essentially don't work at all in the City. I'm not too surprised by that - because after all, there are 100's of routers and phones and whatnot visible in 2.4Ghz in the city, right?  Interference has rendered 2.4Ghz equipment non-functional, right?


So - I had this older non-Cambium gear on my house, pointing to my non-Cambium sector about 4Km away - right across town. LOS is good, signals are -60 or so, but it is right across town and I hear dozens of routers from my site survey.  This older non-Cambium gear would struggle along at about 1 Mbit per second of real throughput, and it'd maybe be able to get up to 3 or 5 Mbit at 3 AM when there was a bit less interference, but it also might only get to 700kbit at 7 PM when everyone is using their routers.  SO - I thought that 2.4Ghz is pretty much dead (of course) in the city.

Enter the Cambium ePMP...   So, I think to myself, well, I have this Sector antenna already there, and I have the mount and the 22dBi grid already there - and they already have RPSMA connectors on them....    so, I replace the AP (just the radio, connected to the same sector antenna) and I replace my CPE (again, just the radio, connected to the same DualPol grid dish) and that's that.  Same cables, same mount, same antennas, same aiming - no changes except the radios....

...and if I set the QOS to unlimited, I can get 60-70 Mbit download and 20-30 Mbit upload now, in a 20Mhz channel (2452Mhz) 

>Downlink    67.588 Mbps

>Uplink          26.376 Mbps

I normally have my radio's QOS set to 20 Mbit down and 2 Mbit upload, and it hits that bang on all the time.

>Downlink   20.625 Mbps
>Uplink           2.073 Mbps
 
SO - I think that 5Ghz would probably still be a better choice in good LOS situations, but I'm very, very impressed with what ePMP is able to accomplish in noisy 2.4Ghz environments.  As far as I can see, it's not dead by any means!
 
And, I'd bet if Cambium released a LITE licensed AP version, there would be more 2.4Ghz AP's deployed. :)  If anyone agrees that they'd like to try 2.4Ghz on a LITE GPS AP - click here and vote!
http://community.cambiumnetworks.com/t5/Your-Ideas/2-4Ghz-ePMP-LITE-10-user-GPS-Synced-Access-Point/idi-p/51619
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