Comment by candiddevmike

4 days ago

Sounds very optimistic to consistently deliver 2.5Gbps to that size of cell, your backhaul has to be huge.

6 comments

candiddevmike

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Nick-W  4 days ago

It's not hard at all, we multipath all traffic across our mesh, we have multiple 10gbps fiber uplinks, and we're bringing up our first 100gbps circuit later this year. Most sites have plenty of capacity and we always try to ensure we have 2-4 paths out of every site. Unlicensed 60ghz is super easy to reuse, we drop 20dB once we're more than 0.2deg off the site, and since we operate in rural mountainous areas, our spectrum at each host location ends up being sparkling clean. Our APs have a 30deg azi/cell width, and we can do up to ~30 attachments on each. Best of all, Wave gear has a backup radio - if I need to take down/upgrade an AP, nobody ever notices, the stations all roam to a nearby AP on a 5ghz backup, and can usually still get around 300-600mbps or so.

  • vitus  4 days ago

    How does that perform in heavy rain or snow? I've always been told that when dealing with mmWave, attenuation gets pretty bad when dealing with adverse climate conditions, and Boulder is surely no stranger to snow.

    • Nick-W  4 days ago

      Great - our radios also have a built-in 5ghz backup that is seamless to switch to and causes no interruptions to gaming sessions or anything, but honestly we only see it in use under two scenarios: The radio is literally knocked off the mount and pointing at the ground (and is still getting ~100mbps somehow), or for our long-range links (5km-20km) during really major storms.

      The backup is great and shockingly resilient, nobody ever notices when it's in use and it'll usually still get us 300-600mbps of throughput on average. I'd say we typically see about 5-10% of the network revert to the backup radio during a major blizzard/hailstorm, otherwise everything seems to do quite well with normal snow & rain.

  • TrexArms  4 days ago

    I'll understand if you don't want to answer this or legally can't answer it. What does a 100gbps circuit cost a month? How about the 10gbps uplinks also?