Most Satisfying Network Job Ever - Ubiquiti Rocks!

alluseridsrejected

alluseridsrejected

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Central TX
Living in the country is awesome and I love it. Don't miss the city at all, but not having access to DSL sux! When I first moved to the country I had a grandfathered unlimited IBM employee discounted Sprint 3G account. It worked very well for the first few years but about 2 years ago it started going down hill to the point it was useless. Sprint tech support was no help either, so I got fed up with it and signed up for a pay through the nose 25G a month Verizon 4G account. 4G works well, but I do not believe Verizon's data usage. I could barley make the 25G last all month and I absolutely NEVER stream any video on it. To make it worse, next month I loose 10GB bonus so it cuts back to 15GB. I have DSL at my store in town.

So in desperation I bought 2 of these:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...2&cm_re=nanobridge-_-0ED-0005-00082-_-Product

My house is 2.6 mi/ 4.2 km direct line from my store. Fortunately for me my house already had a 50' tv antenna tower attached to the back of the roof.

But I am not really in shape to climb the tower, so to mount the antenna I removed the dish from it so it is basically just a nanostation. I strapped the nanostation to the end of 2 10' pieces of 3/4" metal emt connected together. I epoxied magnets removed from failed hard drives up and down the emt and held the radio straight up in the air, standing at the peak of my roof about 20' in the air, where the tower bolts to the house and leaned it against the tower until I heard cla-chink, cla-chick, cla-chink from the magnets.

At my store I just have the nanobridge with dish still attached on a tripod with a 10' piece of 1" emt.

I am getting a fair signal of -80dbm and about 5mbits. Of course this is winter time when the leaves have fallen and I may have issues when the foilage returns. So I will probably be putting up a telescoping 30' mask on the roof of my store. That should improve my signal/speed as well.

I know y'all in the city take your broadband for granted, but me and my family spent the whole weekend streaming Netflix over FREE at home unlimited internet for the first time ever! :D
 
alluseridsrejected said:
I know y'all in the city take your broadband for granted, but me and my family spent the whole weekend streaming Netflix over FREE at home unlimited internet for the first time ever! :D
Click to expand...


Fair play :D I love the idea of the magnets. Find someone who doesn't mind going up to the top and you might get even better!
 
Congrats on your wireless install !!!!

What speeds do you have at the shop? Just wondering how much higher that 5 Meg can go.
 
Based on that speed it sounds like you are providing us with your Internet speed.
I'm curious to know what your site to site speed is.

I like the magnet idea, really out of the box.
 
I have a major update to this thread so I am reviving it. I have a long time customer with a business just down the street from me. He just built a new custom home and could not get internet or even cell reception. He is 8 miles as a bird flies from town. His only option was satellite. He wanted internet like he gets in town at his business with his DSL line. He knew how I am sending internet to my house. I told him I thought we could reach his house from a higher tower. He didn't even hesitate at the cost of a almost 100' tower, so I found an installer and ordered the tower. We just installed everything this weekend and his connection is working great! Below is a screen shot of the connection we are getting along with a photo of the tower:

avYTa



If you can make out the radios at the top of the tower, I used a Ubiquiti Rocket M900 with a yagi antenna pointing to the customer's house that has the same on the other end and is delivering the signal in the photo above. Right under that, I had the tower installer install 3 Ubiquiti Titanium sectors with a 5ghz ac rocket on each sector. I don't have them hooked up yet so I am going to be very busy for a while! I have dozens of customers in the same boat as he was and he is giving me free use of his new tower to provide service to others outside DSL range. I cut him a deal on my labor in exchange for use of the tower to help out the others that already begging me to get them service.
 

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Nice...
Can't wait to get a project to use the new little NanoBeams or PowerBeams with...those little inexpensive point to points are getting fast now.

What was our clients cost for that tower?
 
YeOldeStonecat said:
Nice...
Can't wait to get a project to use the new little NanoBeams or PowerBeams with...those little inexpensive point to points are getting fast now.

What was our clients cost for that tower?
Click to expand...
Yes, I have a box full of the nanobeam ac 16's waiting to install after I get the sectors fired up. No nanobeam ac 19s available till like April though.
 
MCDIT said:
That's wild! Is that saying 50+Mbps over 8 miles?
Click to expand...
Yes it is 8 miles. The TX/RX rate is the rate that "the radios talk to each other". Real life speed is less, but it is still plenty to handle their entire 20/2mbps DSL line. I could have gotten much better speed on the 5ghz powerbeam ac that stonecat mentioned, but I felt we had the greatest chance of getting a good connection with the lowest chance of failure on the 900mhz frequency. The 900mhz probably would not work well in a more populated area where there is more interference/noise, but in a rural area, these radios I used tolerate obstruction like trees much better.
 
alluseridsrejected said:
Yes it is 8 miles. The TX/RX rate is the rate that "the radios talk to each other". Real life speed is less, .
Click to expand...

The capacity shown is actual traffic going over the air from radio to radio. I forget the actual wording they use (I'll get reminded in 2 weeks when I go to NYC for AirFiber certification), but it is actual traffic between the radios, they run full bore transmitting UDP packets back and forth at full speed to max the connection. So if you see a connection at 90 megs in the bar graph, those radios are talking to each other at 90 megs. If you actually benchmark between the radios with another utility you'll get about 99% of what that shows, for UDP traffic, and nearly that with multi stream TCP traffic. I remember when I was first setting up that 6 mile shot across water last summer with the AF5U units....at first I had a ~200 meg link between them...and the Comcast connection I was feeding the school with was at 175 at the gateway....I was still getting 174 or so at the schools end After some fine tuning and aiming of the radios they're now averaging a 300 meg link...and I have yet to get aiming dead up (my signal.aiming graphs are only about 80%). Once totally aimed dead on the radios should get above 500 megs between themselves...and I'm in a very congested (noisy) radio tower on the mainland side. Many people in Ubiquitis forums never though I'd get a link..but a few told me no problem..you can exist in a noise environment with certain radios. Think of really powerful flashlight beams....like spotlight beams used back in World War Two from the ground shooting up into the sky to illuminate bombers for anti aircraft guns. You just need to aim those beams onto each other from opposing units. Doesn't matter how many other beams are in the area as long as they're not aimed directly into your pair of dishes.

Running performance tests from behind routers/equipment, if actual benchmark numbers are less, the culprit for the performance loss is likely issues with the cabling. Be it connections with those pain in the butt toughcable connectors, or those pain in the butt ether surge protectors.

Have you see RFArmors mounting/shielding hardware? Pretty inexpensive way to protect the smaller units, and improve performance by having them focus the beams better and shield/block out interference from other radios. www.rfarmor.com
 
YeOldeStonecat said:
Have you see RFArmors mounting/shielding hardware? Pretty inexpensive way to protect the smaller units, and improve performance by having them focus the beams better and shield/block out interference from other radios. www.rfarmor.com
Click to expand...
Yes, but the reason I went with titanium sectors is they are better built with improved shielding already built in and don't need the extra rfarmor
 
Just to add to my previous comment about the titanium sectors, there are a couple of threads on the ubnt forums with vigorous debate about titanium sectors vs rfarmor + regular sectors and what made me decide was this comment from the guy that makes the rfarmor:

https://community.ubnt.com/t5/Business-Talk/Titanium-Sector-vs-RF-Armor/td-p/337947/page/3

2 choices:

Buy Titanium sectors and Rockets or save $100 to $150 per sector and buy regular sectors, rocket, and shields.

Ther is a reason 30,000+ shields have been sold and there is a reason Ubiquiti incorporated my shield design into their Titanium line.
Click to expand...

But his comment was in 2012 and they do make rfarmor for the titaniums now. My interpretation is the rf armor is still needed for the titaniums if you are in high "noise floor" area. So I may end up regretting not adding them but I am not in "noisy" area.
 
You're using a Yagi type for this 8 mile point to point through right?
I haven't used sectors, but from what I've read and envision...since they shoot out at a wide angle they're more for shorter range point to multi points. Like...put on a roof of a marinas main building, aim it at several docks/piers...and have it shoot out to 2 or 3 or 4 receiving radios.

I didn't use RF's on my AF5 install, despite being in a crazy high noisy environment on the mainland side.
 
Yes, I am using the directional Yagi for the 8 mile link. The 3 sectors are going to be used for PTMP that are much closer but still outside DSL range (as little as 1/2 mile is some areas) . I will be extremely luck if I can get 5 miles out of the sectors, but I will be happy if I can get 3-3.5mile links.

I just talked to the customer, she made a facebook post about her new internet and has over 20 locals asking her when I am going to get internet to them. :)
 
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