starting a new wisp building on multiple towers in SE Ohio hilly country. initially trying to hit roughly 250 customers hoping to provide 25-50 mbps starting with 1 gig back haul that can be scaled as needed. first deployment will on a water tower i will need to deploy APs to use as repeaters was looking at the 450m for the tower and 450i as repeaters’ is that a good solution? what are your thoughts?
if by repeaters are you meaning using a SM to provide to another AP? if yes, then NO. You would be farther ahead to use either a dedicated ptp or at least an epmp 3000 in ptp mode. The reason is that you will overload your main AP with the oversubscription that is taking place and if you need to reboot the main AP you kill the entire network not just a small area.
for 20-50Mbps in hilly terrain ( with trees?) I would look to placing a 450i-900or two on the top of the water tower ( make sure you have good back to back separation) and then consider higher frequencies later when you want to offer higher packages and can provide more tower locations.
Use LinkPlanner to map out your network and place client side devices where you hope to connect clients. This will give you a good (not great but still good) idea of what to use and a fairly realistic range from the AP.
Dont use SM-to-AP repeaters. Though this works, it will be your Achilleas heel when you have problems. Small ptp links are far better and can easily be upgraded should you need more throughput. This also allows you to add a router to each tower and route your data flows and manage your broadcast domain into smaller chunks which will make more bandwidth available over the links as there is less broadcasts.