On Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 09:05:56AM -0400, Peter Boone wrote:
I'm looking for some equipment recommendations for a wireless bridge between two locations approximately 500-800 meters apart. The current setup for this company has been extremely unstable and slow. I don't have a lot of experience in this area so I was hoping someone could give me a few pointers.
We use Nortel 7230 wireless bridges and are *very* happy with them. They run at 5.8 GHz, 20 Mbps full duplex (really 18 Mbps data rate), do transparent bridging, and pass VLAN tagged frames just fine. For one particular link, we continually push the full 18 Mbps and they work fine. They are PoE powered via a power brick in the network closets, with a single Cat5 cable up to the outdoor unit which has the antenna integrated. We've had very few failures over the years--mainly a few infancy failures shortly after installation. We have about 40 units (20 links), all less than 1 km apart, most of them a few hundred meters across city streets. These are the third generation of wireless bridge products we have used, and they far outperform the older ones, especially from a reliability and maintenance perspective. We will be looking to upgrade these over the next few years to get more bandwidth in some locations, and I'm not overly optimistic about finding something that matches these from a reliability and ease-of-use perspective--I would appreciate it if you share a summary of any results you find.