Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Are you using something like a CradlePoint for your WISP?


If it 1,5 Mb and radio mount on a tower I would more guessing toward the side of PTP line of sight Link or such Mikrotik, Unifi instead of cellular cradlepoint.


In the US:

Ubiquiti, Cambium, probably not Tarana because that's way too expensive for a 1.5Mbps sub. Mikrotik radios are fairly rare here, but the routers and switches are everywhere.


Thats interesting ! Mikrotik routers and switches are very cheap, I wonder why they one product line is extremely common but the radios are rare rather than roughly equivalent spread ?


Mikrotik has not (yet?) gone down the path of shipping sector radios supporting massive MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output -- an 8x8 array can deliver 8 times as much data as 1 stream within the same channel size) as vendors like Cambium have. The additional capacity on tower sectors from additional streams combined with MU-MIMO (Multi-User MIMO that transmits to multiple subscriber radios at the same time based on the number of streams the transmitter supports combined with client radios that are typically 2x2) is a great way to gain capacity where spectrum is exhausted. Higher order QAM support like the new 12 bits per symbol modulation in 802.11be tends not to be so useful for WISPs as getting the SNR to the level required to support it tends to be is challenging, especially in 6 GHz spectrum where transmit power limitations require much higher gain antennas for client radios (at least here in Canada where EIRP is limited to 36dBm).

Mikrotik is still quite heavily used for their routers and switches among WISPs. They are the most affordable vendor for 100Gbps switches. Pity we don't have a better open source software stack for their hardware.

Ubiquiti is also actively neglecting the WISP market. Anything that isn't UniFi seems to be mostly abandoned these days.


Just generally not as reliable or as advanced as the competition for not much more, generally. They are doing some interesting work with LTE in Latvia though.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: