New Site: Competitor on 3 channels.....advice

We have a new site we will be deploying soon. There are 2 other providers in town, 1 with a single 2.4 omni and one with a 3 Sector 900 setup. I found room on the 2.4 for my omni, but i’m not sure how to get around the 900 from the other guy. My site is roughly 2000 feet Northeast of him. He has sectors facing South, Northeast and Northwest. We are both near the same height. Does anyone have suggestions on how to get around him? I’m wanting to use an omni for lack of customer density right now. We both run GPS sync.


Additional Details:

I am NW of him with my Omni.
His sectors are arranged as follows:
NW - 906
S - 915
NE -924

first off, is yours 900 or 2.4?

We have a 900 omni and a 2.4 omni.
Being as close as we are, is there a way to work around the other guy? I’m not opposed to buying sectors if it helps. My site is on the NE corner of town. The main reason for the 900 is to blast back across town facing SW and pick up the customers 2.4 won’t hit. The 2.4 will work fine in the other directions.

You’d probably be best off buying sectors at 900 and trying to coordinate frequency, control slots, downlink% and distance so that you two can coexist. The last 4 things are a must in order for your timing to match up, but depending on how his sectors are positioned, you might be able to get away with putting your omni on the non-used frequency in that direction - I would recommend against this, though.

you can also try running in the opposite polarity as the other guy.

Would changing polarity really help enought to make it where we can tolerate each other?

So they guy came in my office raising h*** this morning saying i needed to shut it off immediately and that he had all the frequencies. He said the only way for us both to run 900 is to have something that frequency hops, which i took to mean an alvarion product. Any ideas???

frequency hopping wouldnt work.esp if he already has all 3 channels locked down. he doesnt own the channels because its unliscensed. and trust me, you dont wanna touch alvarion 900mhz products with a 10 foot pole.
truth of the matter is, if all 3 channels are being being used in that close of an area, your options are : be in a different polarity, use a different freq. , dont be there at all, or buy your competitor out.

TylerTreat wrote:
Would changing polarity really help enought to make it where we can tolerate each other?


possibly, seeing something ins cross polarization (IE if your in vertical hes in horizontal ) you would see each other at 15-20 db's less than if you were in the same polarization.

he’s seeing me at -40something

sites are about 1500 feet apart.

well if its that close cross pol would limit your installs to about a -60 so anybody with a lower signal than that would have problems. sounds like its just a lost cause there.


edit: this is why you do a spectrum analysis of a site before you deploy ANYTHING.

I knew he was there. i’ve done installs for him before. It was more of an experiment to see “just how much” trouble we would cause each other, not having seen it firsthand before.

I see no reason why you can’t coexist if you coordinate settings and frequency usage. There are tons of providers all over the world in the same situation that seem to do it just fine.

This guy won’t coordinate. He put a guy through the wringer in the next town over on a similar deal. Does anyone have a preferred 2.4 sector? I will pull my 900 and use it in the next town. (Not as saturated anyways.) It’s not worth the effort to fight him. Or i may just leave the 900 up there for him to sweat a little…but I like to think of myself as more professional than that.

Has anyone here worked with Alvarion 900 or anything in the 3.65 range, as i am already licensed.

TylerTreat wrote:

Has anyone here worked with Alvarion 900 or anything in the 3.65 range, as i am already licensed.

as i stated earlier, my experience with Alv 900 is horrible. you couldnt pay me to use it again. bad product, bad design, bad all the way around.

If he has 3 channels of Alvarion in the air, you have little chance with an Omni.

If he is on V-Pol (likely) you might get away with a single 120 h-Pol sector on the Alvarion channel facing away from you. With ~20dB of X-POL rejection, and ~15dB of F/B rejection per antenna you would see almost 50dB of reduction - he’d have a hard time hearing you.

Personally in this situation I wouldn’t bother with 900. Go with your 2.4GHz and hold out for TV White Space - this is the 900 killer. The motorola@wispa.org mail list is where most of the discussion on TVWS is taking place.

3.65GHz is not a bad idea, but it has less penetrating power than 2.4GHz. My concern with 3.65GHz is that the license does not protect you for other operators, it just allows you to use it. I have been working trying to get a pass from the Earth Ground Stations as 3.65GHz will be an excellent PTP solution in our noisy region but it would be a poor solution for PTMP.

He has 3 sectors of canopy 900 HPOL. I’m thinking about scrapping 900 altogether for this town. He has 9 Sectors in the next town over 6 hpol, 3 vpol. He has around 3k customers total i believe - the top dog of the locals guys around here.

In your opinion, who has the strongest 2.4 sector?

Thanks!
Tyler

sounds like 900 is pretty well used up to me.

MTI Wireless Edge or Til-Tek. Both are costly but they will provide the longest links and most even coverage.

I would agree to that. I have a MTI HPOL Omni, that for the little i’ve used it, seems to be pretty outstanding.
Have any of you put in an omni to cover a localized area, such as a subdivision?
It may be possible for me to put up a sector on a culdesac that i have 15 customers already prepaid. It may by my way around his coverage capabilities on the 900.

I have used a Ubiquity NS2 with a V-POL Omni to connect a few users about 1/4 mile apart. Works fine.