ooow, yeah, you folks in the city are soo many even frequency is rare. im about half a km and my ccq is 100% my friend david lives across the creek about 3km and his ccq is more or less in the 70-80 threshold. it must really suck to live in south B / C im sure everyone has their gadgets left at default and not optimized to correct for collisions and all that. then again, maybe everyone is trying to sell internet to everyone.... :-) On Tue, Aug 24, 2010 at 11:16 PM, Haggai Nyang <haggai.nyang@gmail.com>wrote:
@Brainiac
5km nano to nano can work - personally have once surfed with a laptop 2km away from a 2.4 mikrotik radio (LOS obviously) - but it really depends on the environment i.e. interference. For example the nairobi west & south c areas are a real pain in the a** to get a 2.4 point to point up and running all the way from 2412 to 2472Mhz. In my tests it was from a few 2.4 mikrotiks to several nanostations. You can get a good signal but CCQ could be less than 20%. That's how you know interference is barking up your tree.
Another interesting thing I have noticed is not all laptops get the same signal strength from the same AP at the same distance. HP, Dell and Macs are good but I have seen a couple of Toshibas with issues.
There are so many devices using 2.4GHz (even cordless phones) and with its affinity for water (read foliage) and total absorption by concrete...IMO it's better to set up multiple repeaters with cheaper units like locostations which bridge the traffic to the main station e.g. like butterfly did. In this case the halostations are good enough...in short having clients accessing your mast/base station with their cpe radios is a sure way to ensure quality of service than them running around from room to room looking for the best signal and calling you day after day.
Lastly, using several sector antennas is waay better in terms of client link stability than having one omni on the mast. You can also set up bridging among the antennas to have seamless hopping as they get out of range of one and go to another while they have similar SSIDs. Make sure you use different frequencies among the sectors in such a case. It is also highly advisable you use dedicated minipci cards (or radios) per sector than using a signal splitter. These strategies have worked for me countless times over the past several years in different places in and out of Nairobi, and they work for all spectra, not just 2.4GHz.
My 10 cents :o)
_______________________________________________ Skunkworks mailing list Skunkworks@lists.my.co.ke http://lists.my.co.ke/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/skunkworks ------------ Skunkworks Server donations spreadsheet
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AopdHkqSqKL-dHlQVTMxU1VBdU1BSWJxdy1f... ------------ Skunkworks Rules http://my.co.ke/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=94 ------------ Other services @ http://my.co.ke
-- Posted on 100% recycled electrons