Hello folks! My name is Dustin and I work for a company called Aristotle out of Little Rock, Arkansas. We were selected to do some 450i 900 beta testing so I wanted to leave my findings and feedback for all to see. I did testing in a rural and urban environment.
First let me give you some background on our rural areas. We are heavily wooded with pine and oak trees with rolling hills that make it a difficult terrain to deal with.
Look at all of the beautiful trees!
Our subscriber base in this area is all 900MHz customers. We are deployed on the water towers around the area. They range from 80ft to 135ft. The tower we deployed on was one of the 135ft water towers. It currently has 5 900MHz APs that are active. It has most of our 900 customer base while the other towers around have 2-3 APs per tower.
I installed the AP on the top of the tower and I also installed a CMM4 at the bottom of the tower. I swapped everything else over to the CMM4 as well then went to testing. I have attached a KMZ file for the area of testing with pins with all the data I will be talking about below.
The very first test I did, I couldn't believe the results. I stopped about 3/4 of a mile away from the tower just to verify my equipment was working correctly. This is what I saw:
(We use a water tower and not the cell tower shown here. Our water tower is beside it behind the trees you see there.)
I can say I said some things that met with my disbelief at first followed by my amazement. You are seeing this right. 45MB aggregate on 900MHz. The first test was on a 10MHz channel in an area completely saturated with 900MHz interference.
(Side note: 10MHz channel in the area I was in was comprable to ATT LTE)
I remoted into my work PC using Team Viewer (awesome program for those that don't know about it) and changed to 7MHz. I was able to get 30MB aggregate. 25 down and 6 up. Still amazing in my opinion, for 900MHz. I then switched to 5MHz and got about 18MB aggregate. 12 down and 3 up.
The next test location is about 1.3 miles away from our tower. This location is actually one where we have a current 900MHz customer.
(You can see the customer's antenna if you look closely enough on the metal building. It's just above the one I'm holding.)
Our water tower is somewhere behind that wall of trees. We still had amazing results:
At 10MHz we had about 27MB aggregate (shown above). At 7MHz we had 17MB aggregate. 11 down and 6 up. At 5MHz we had 15MB aggregate. 10 down and 5 up.
We then moved behind the metal building just to test.
We were at -74 at ground level shooting through a metal storage building and still pulled over 12MB aggregate on this connection.
Now the next test we did is something I feel is important to talk about. We went to a spot that I knew we couldn't get service with our current 900MHz system. It's about 11 meters lower than anything else around it. I told the guy with me that if we could get service here, this would definitely be a sign that this new 900MHz 450i stuff was really something awesome.
We parked here:
and got the following:
At -88dBm I was able to get the above connection in a known location the original 900MHz equipment wouldn't even pick up our AP. Folk. Listen. This is at -88dBm. After working with 900 FSK this to me is amazing.
I did a few other testing locations which are included on the map. Once we concluded our rural test, we moved on to an urban test. I performed an urban test because of the guy who did a case study on urban testing a month or so ago. Thank you for that testing and I'm sure the rest of the community appreciates it as well.
For our urban testing, we installed our 450i AP on the Baptist Health Hospital located in downtown Little Rock. I expected a lot of interference before putting it up. At this location we did not have a CMM4 in place. We used only the "Generate Sync" option in the AP.
Our first testing location was a two story house somewhat down in a hole. We also had three two story houses slightly above up and in the way for testing. You can see me here trying my best (I'm pretty short) to get up and over those houses. I didn't do very well but the radio did.
With being down in a hole and three two story houses in front and somewhat above us, I was able to get a -71dBm. I used a 5MHz channel at this location because of the interference so I was only able to pull about 8-10MB aggregate.
We left here and went to a bowling alley on the other side of the hill. It has line of sight to the hospital.
(Hospital not pictured because my picture taker wasn't the best in the world :P)
At this location we were able to pull 20MB aggregate with a 10MHz channel.
I do have some additional feedback after testing as well:
- I do not like that 450i APs run on 48v although I understand why. I will have to redesign my battery backup box to accommodate the new 450i APs.
- I do like the smaller antennas and the easy mount design of the 450i.
- I do like that the yagi antennas are approximately the same size that we currently use.
- I do like that you don’t have to swap the PoE injectors in the customer premises. It’ll make swap out that much easier.
- I do like that you have 5,7,10, and 20 MHz selections to choose from.
- I do not like that I have to re-pin my cable ends to support the CMM4 to power the APs. I do know there are dongles available to do the pin swapping for me.
I have already had several folks approach me for assistance and information. I don't mind this at all. If anyone here would like some configuration advice or just want to ask questions, don't hesitate. I'll even TeamViewer into a machine (did that earlier for some guys), do phone convos, etc.
Again I have attached a folder with all of my pictures and a KMZ file of the two areas I tested. I have notes on each pin to indicate results at each spot.
I want to also thank Cambium for giving Aristotle the opportunity to perform the 900 450i beta testing. We really enjoyed doing this and certainly helped us in the decision to move forward with overhauling our current 900MHz network with new gear.
Talk to you guys soon!
Dustin Stock
Wireless Network Engineer
Aristotle.net Inc