ePMP 2000 and Smart Antenna. Beamforming antenna

Hi,

Does LINKPlanner automatically assume that the Smart Antenna Beamforming antenna is in use when selecting the ePMP 1000, 2000 Sector antenna (C050900D021) as the AP antenna? 

Is there a choice where can you have the Smart Beamformining as an option or not in order to evaluate the link quality?  Comparison on the impact of using beamforming in planning your network.

 I would like to see how LINKPlanner will show the differences when using an ePMP 2000 with / without the Smart Antenna option in use.  In particular, predicted uploads.

Regards.

LINKPlanner does not perform the calculations any differently for beamforming antennas and at the moment it does not need to know if the antenna has beamforming capabilities. The interference that is set for the AP and SM is used during the calculation.

Thanks,

Andy

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Hi Andy;

OK.  Thanks.  

Will LINKPlanner determine for a sector which clients / SM devices will most likely not be able to take advantage of the beamforming?  Like out of range or something.  Is that something that will be on the roadmap?   I would imagine that since there are several flagship products that has beamforming technology in it such as the ePMP 2000 and soon to be ePMP 3000 that this may be included eventually.

Regards.

It isn't included in the current plan, but it may be something that we consider in the future if we need it for the prediction calculations.

One of the main uses of beamforming antennas is to reduce the amount of interference on a given path. Before we can support the beamforming functionality we need to incorporate interference analysis into LINKPlanner. This is on our roadmap and once we have that in place we will consider how we can better emulate the advantages of the beamforming antennas. Please be aware that all planning tools can only predict the improvements in intra-network interference from other sites within the network plan. Interference from other sources is not known by the planning tool and therefore it is difficult to predict the improvement for a given scenario even though significant improvement may be seen over a standard sector antenna.

It is a very significant program to add a capability to support interference analysis and we have other functionality we need to incorporate first to enable this development, therefore although it is on the roadmap it is not likely to be available in 2018.

Regards,

Rachel

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Hi Rachel;

Excellent follow-up response and explanation.    Thanks very much.

Regards.