As the subject states I am looking to setup a small deployment in my hometown but we do have alot trees that run along the streets and avenues. The tower will be centralized in the town and will have 360 degree coverage. I am looking for insight on best way to penetrate the foliage and deliver reliable service. I was hoping to use the new ePMP line but see that the ePMP 3000 5mhz sector antenna is only 17db. I looked into UBNT as well and they have a 19 and 20 db 5mhz sectors, the 19db being the 120 degree and the 20db being the 90 degree sector. Thanks in advanced.
If it is like where I am located, a 30 db sector and 30 db dish with AP and SM radios at full blast is not going to penetrate. At least not enough for reliable, high quality internet using 5Ghz. A breeze comes disburting trees between SM and tower and your -65 is now a -85 and SM is disonnecting and reconnecting until breeze stops. 2.4Ghz penetrates -some- but is mostly useless in an urban environment.
We mount our units on poles, buildings, and even out the top of trees to get LOS to our towers. After Hurricane Florence we have started to use radomes on any Force 200/300 that is out the top of a tree. Has cut down on mast bends dramatically. We just had Dorian come through, and although Dorian was a miss, we did have masts bend from wind gusts. The -only- masts that bent were 200/300's with -no- radome. Point is, if you are in a windy area radomes are a good investment.
We are extremely happy with the 3000/300 performance. We have 2 greenfield ePMP3000 towers located inside an urban area using 20Mhz channels. We have a customer outside city limits registering at -67 and still pulling MCS8-9 99% of the time (pristine RF conditions at SM) . We have customers inside city limits registering at -60 pulling MCS8-9 80-85% of the time, with MCS7 being the lowest modulation rate (noise at SM).
One more thing, the competitor you mentioned does not utilize MU-MIMO and does not perform beam forming to individual SM's. Using a 20Mhz channel, and under perfect conditions, we have performed MU-MIMO Wireless Link Tests using the AP's GUI that have yielded a combined download of 235+Mbps. Throw in 30+Mbps of upload and you have 265+Mbps aggregate throughput. We are easily seeing 150+Mbps of real world MU-MIMO download in a 20Mhz channel. You will not see this from the competitions current offerings.
I am sure some will have similar advice while others have differing advice as we are all in different areas with different networks.
Depending on the height of your tower and distance to your subs, a high-gain sector may not be ideal because of the narrow vertical beam-width. When we have a tower within the town we use traditional high gain sectors for the farm sites, which are typically a mile plus distance and then use horns or low-gain sectors (larger vertical beam-width) for in town connections.
As far as 2.4ghz goes, we find that we can get about 10-15% more customers on a tower by using 2.4. But the connections are never as good as 5ghz.
If you can get access to things like street lights, power poles, etc you can build a little micro-pop solution. We've had a lot of luck with this method. We use a combination of 60ghz and 5ghz ptp to jump from main-tower down to pole, and do the same for pole to pole connections. We have an epmp1000/2000 with an omni, and a small enclosure with a POE switch at each micro-pop.
In FCC land you will have to crank the power way down even with 17dB sectors so hopefully those 19 and 20's are more useful where ever you are.
I have micropops were a house 200ft from the micropop hardly eeks out -65 because there are 4 ceder trees between them so I'm pretty sure you won't reach most of your town with a single 5Ghz PoP. Here the terrain is very hilly and tree covered and even with radios on 3 towers and 4 micropops I can't reach even 1/2 the homes in the 2 mile long/wide town due to trees and terrain. How far from this tower are you wanting to reach ?
Also depends on what kind of speeds you want to offer. Even if you get 5Ghz to go through a lot of the trees you're not going to be offering 100Mbps services with most your customers at -78.
What is 5Ghz noise like in this town ? Depending on the regulations in your area the frequencies available to you may be very crowded.
I would probably put some AP's on the tower and reach what I could from them but use the tower primarily to do PTP feeding micropops. Even then you will probably find there are some parts of town that are unreachable when you can't even find one spot in a area where you can LOS the tower for a micropop.
Depending on the speeds you want to offer 900Mhz 450i might be better in a place with a lot of trees/clutter if you don't want to do micropops. The 450 stuff is pretty pricey though.