Wireless Community Broadband – A how to – The Ultimate Guide

Big Lar · 17-10-2011 4:56pm #1

Well to be honest it’s not quite the ultimate guide at the moment, but over the coming months I hope that this will thread do what it says on the tin.

Going to try and get Wireless Community Broadband for Clashmore, Co Waterford. Owned by, Run by and for the people of Clashmore and the surrounding areas. Hopefully some folks may be able to lend a helping hand to this thread by giving advice and others may be able to learn from the success and hopefully few mistakes we make along the way, It is my hope that we can make a template here for other communities who would like to do the same.

Clashmore in West Waterford is a very nice place to live, Nice People, Schools, Drink etc etc...… but what it not so nice is the Internet Service that is provided, there have been a few wireless Internet service providers but my experience of them has been poor and of course we have dongles which offer basic access, but nothing like what DSL or Fibre users experience.

I can get a dedicated line(Node) from Eircom in any of the local exchanges: Ardmore, Youghal or Aglish to be installed within 500m of the exchange and this line can take up to 150mbs which will lead to a Data Centre located in Dublin then I will be able to access the internet, and as you may have guessed tis a tad expensive.

Node costs = €2,000.00 Per year
Traffic of 50mbs bandwidth on that line = €1,527.00 Per year
50mbd through the Data centre costs = €3,000.00 Per year

Total costs of €6527.00 plus vat per year, which comes to €7897.00, monthly that’s about €658.00, Plus initial setup costs: Like I am going to have to rent a location within 500m from the telephone exchange and install some equipment. Course we could go with a 30mbs connection which would cost about €400.00 per month, a 20mbs connection would be around €300.00 odd, divide any of the packages up between 20+ customers and its an easy bill to pay.

I have a family and work myself and am unable to run the project full time so I need help for this, I intend to organize a public meeting to see if there is an interest in the community, and then go if there is an interest organize a bit of a committee and please god go forward from there.

I will also stick a thread in the Waterford Country forum in an effort to rally support.

bigpaddy2004 · 17-10-2011 11:10pm

Big Lar wrote: »

Well to be honest it’s not quite the ultimate guide at the moment, but over the coming months I hope that this will thread do what it says on the tin.

Going to try and get Wireless Community Broadband for Clashmore, Co Waterford. Owned by, Run by and for the people of Clashmore and the surrounding areas. Hopefully some folks may be able to lend a helping hand to this thread by giving advice and others may be able to learn from the success and hopefully few mistakes we make along the way, It is my hope that we can make a template here for other communities who would like to do the same.

Clashmore in West Waterford is a very nice place to live, Nice People, Schools, Drink etc etc...… but what it not so nice is the Internet Service that is provided, there have been a few wireless Internet service providers but my experience of them has been poor and of course we have dongles which offer basic access, but nothing like what DSL or Fibre users experience.

I can get a dedicated line(Node) from Eircom in any of the local exchanges: Ardmore, Youghal or Aglish to be installed within 500m of the exchange and this line can take up to 150mbs which will lead to a Data Centre located in Dublin then I will be able to access the internet, and as you may have guessed tis a tad expensive.
Node costs = €2,000.00 Per year

Traffic of 50mbs bandwidth on that line = €1,527.00 Per year

50mbd through the Data centre costs = €3,000.00 Per year

Total costs of €6527.00 plus vat per year, which comes to €7897.00, monthly that’s about €658.00, Plus initial setup costs: Like I am going to have to rent a location within 500m from the telephone exchange and install some equipment. Course we could go with a 30mbs connection which would cost about €400.00 per month, a 20mbs connection would be around €300.00 odd, divide any of the packages up between 20+ customers and its an easy bill to pay.

I have a family and work myself and am unable to run the project full time so I need help for this, I intend to organize a public meeting to see if there is an interest in the community, and then go if there is an interest organize a bit of a committee and please god go forward from there.

I will also stick a thread in the Waterford Country forum in an effort to rally support.

Does your quotes include IP Transit? If so thats not too bad a price. Start off small first with about 10Mb. Can not see you needing anymore for a small community.

Big Lar · 18-10-2011 7:35am

I am just a bit of a nerd myself and am running with the idea however I have roped in an IT guy down the road and these are his costings, so I would assume that its all included.

As for the 10Mb, one could say its a lot with contention ratio of what Eircom has of 48:1 and all that but if the largest package we could offer customers was 5Mb and only two customers started downloading at the one time then we are in trouble. We have a public meet scheduled for November 1st and we will see how many customers we have interested and then this should dictate out bandwidth.

Thanks for the input thou, that's what this post is all about.

bigpaddy2004 · 18-10-2011 9:06am

Big Lar wrote: »

I am just a bit of a nerd myself and am running with the idea however I have roped in an IT guy down the road and these are his costings, so I would assume that its all included.

As for the 10Mb, one could say its a lot with contention ratio of what Eircom has of 48:1 and all that but if the largest package we could offer customers was 5Mb and only two customers started downloading at the one time then we are in trouble. We have a public meet scheduled for November 1st and we will see how many customers we have interested and then this should dictate out bandwidth.

Thanks for the input thou, that's what this post is all about.

It is a small community, do not get your hopes up. In reality you will only get about 30 subscribers who will not pay anymore than €30 per month. The odd one alright will want a larger package and willing to pay for it. If you have any local businesses in the area, try to get them on board and charge more. At the end of the day they will require top support and they will also be the most beneficial from your community wisp. Businesses will be a welcome financial boost to your network.
Do not be worried about 2 guys downloading constant at the same time, it rarely ever happens on a single segment, and if it does happen, there is ways of dealing with it.

yuloni · 18-10-2011 9:52pm

This post has been deleted.

Big Lar · 19-10-2011 8:10am

There has been little development since my last post except we have scheduled a public meeting for the 1st of November, We hope to have all our pricing done and a location sorted for our main transmitter for that stage.

To get a bit of public notice for the meeting, We have a Facebook event setup, We have placed a notice of the meeting on the local papers in the local notes sections, We will pamphlet about 4 local schools and stick up a few posters around at public venues, Also I am going email the local radio to see if they will give us a plug.

We have a map at the minute with a bout 14 potential customers on it, so that's a good start in just a few days.

yuloni · 16-11-2011 3:42pm

This post has been deleted.

Big Lar · 18-11-2011 8:35am

Soz been kinda busy with the project and all, We are up and running and have a few guinea pigs on the system.

I will try and explain a bit better over the weekend when I have time.

Sponge Bob · 18-11-2011 2:22pm

Jeez Lar, it is only a month since you started off.

I look forward to hearing this one.

Big Lar · 18-11-2011 10:10pm

A month and 4 days to be exact Sponge Bob

, I am kinda impressed with myself that we have achieved so much I a short space of time
Well in fairness we have come a long way in that short space of time, we have transmitters installed at one location and we have 5 customers/guinea pigs on the network for the last week or so.

Well to start the story off
We have had two wireless internet providers in this area before and none of them have worked out for various reasons that I am not going to go into because its forward that we are going, but suffice to say it was more their fault that the locals fault. I decided to get going and see if it would be feasible to try and get m,y own wireless service going, from the get-go it was not or could not be a money making project due to the fact that if wages were to be taken into account then that was going to be a €4,000.00 bill a month to start which equates to about 130 customers (Avg €30.00 pm) alone just to pay my own wages, this had to be a community project.

I had not one clue where to start so I contacted/pestered a few members on boards that were regular posters in the broadband forums from there I met my future partner in the project Zenith, turned out there was a like minded individual like myself living not too far away from me.

Now I thought that this project was going to be a breeze but only for the knowledge that Zenith brought to the project we would never have gotten as far as we have.
Zenith works in IT and through his contacts we were able to get prices like as in the first post, all we needed was 50 or 60 customers to share the cost and that didn’t happen at our meeting.

The Meeting
At the meeting we had about 10 or so turn up that were mostly neighbours of both of us, I personally found it a bit disheartening but perhaps we didn’t advertise or publicise it as much as we should have.

The backup plan
Although we did not hit the magic figure of 50 or 60 customers, once again through Zenith’ s contacts we contacted a crowd of lads in East Cork who had setup a Community Scheme a few years earlier and they turned out to be our best asset, I am just going to sidetrack for a bit: One thing that I have noticed about this project is everyone in IT has a common goal and that is to help others out in sharing the knowledge that they have, Perhaps its different for us being a community group but the amount of offers of support we have gotten so far has been just nothing short of unbelievable, everywhere we go and almost everyone that we have approached has been eager to help or give advice.
Back to the story at hand, The lads in East Cork agreed to give us a link and sell us a 10Mb connection and we approached a local farmer that had a shed on high ground that had line of sight to Cork and overlooked our area, and in fairness to him he offered the use of his shed to us to place a couple of sectors on.
So that’s more or less it, Like I said in the first sentence we are up and running with a few on the network where we are ironing out the kinks and let me tell ye there has been a few kinks, but in another week or so we should be up and running on a proper basis.

Money wise
I am not going to go into our overheads as that would not be fair on our suppliers and others in the group but we have invested around €1,400.00 in equipment so far which we hope to get back in the next 6 to 12 months from there on in we can reinvest in the network. We have also invested another €1,000.00 in equipment to be placed at user premises but I am not going to include that as we are charging €100.00 for the install so that should be coming back fairly fast.

Ubitiqui 5GHz equipment is what we are using for anyone that’s interested.

That’s it……….. I’m fed up of typing, if I get a chance I will post up more.

Oh yes we have a website up and running also http://www.wwcbb.net/

Thanks for the interest.

Sponge Bob · 18-11-2011 10:38pm

Does your backhaul do one wireless hop from the shed west into Cork Lar , is that also Ubiquiti gear or is the Ubiquiti gear for base station and households only???

I take it you use different frequencies for backhaul and local service , have you expansion room on your chosen frequencies. ??

Big Lar · 19-11-2011 11:35am

Ubiquiti all the way Sponge Bob, although we did get some local advice not to use Ubiquiti on the backhaul as others had problems with it but it was too late as we were about to put up the backhaul link the next day, After reading the Ubiquiti forums I didn’t see much complaints about using Ubiquiti for the backhaul, so we will see how it goes. We just have one hop to our provider in east cork so that’s about 16Km.
About the available channels, there are only about 16 5GHz channels that can be used in Ireland but we can change the bandwidth of each channel to 40, 20, 10 or 5 MHz so this gives us a wide variety of channels to mess around with although the lower the bandwidth the lower the throughput I thing that the 5MHz bandwidth only allows max of 15Mbs throughput so that’s not an option for a main link.

Sponge Bob · 19-11-2011 1:09pm

You are generally safe at 5ghz but make sure your customers do not get Wifi N routers that could interfere with the links..keep them in the 2.4ghz band if possible by disabling the key channels on their routers...by consent.

Big Lar · 15-12-2011 8:39am

bigpaddy2004 wrote: »

Start off small first with about 10Mb. Can not see you needing anymore for a small community.

You were not far wrong bigpaddy, we have a 10Mb connection and currently have 15 users on the system, our traffic has only once peaked at 6Mb.

Usage Graph Here

PogMoThoin · 15-12-2011 9:50am

Big Lar wrote: »

You were not far wrong bigpaddy, we have a 10Mb connection and currently have 15 users on the system, our traffic has only once peaked at 6Mb.

Usage Graph Here

Until a customers teenage child installs the amazing Frostwire they heard about in school, they then tell their neighbours teenager..............................:D

bigpaddy2004 · 15-12-2011 10:46am

PogMoThoin wrote: »

Until a customers teenage child installs the amazing Frostwire they heard about in school, they then tell their neighbours teenager..............................:D

There is ways of dealing with that.....

)

Lar what are you using for routing?

roast · 15-12-2011 1:46pm

That's impressive stuff. Kudos to you sir!

godskitchen · 15-12-2011 6:51pm

This is really impressive. Congratulations on getting this far, please keep us updated.

Big Lar · 17-12-2011 9:48pm

PogMoThoin wrote: »

Until a customers teenage child installs the amazing Frostwire they heard about in school, they then tell their neighbours teenager..............................:D

Our users wouldnt be doing anything like that, Nothing but inoccents round here PogMoThoin

bigpaddy2004 wrote: »

Lar what are you using for routing?

Mikrotik RB750GL

roast wrote: »

That's impressive stuff. Kudos to you sir!

godskitchen wrote: »

This is really impressive. Congratulations on getting this far, please keep us updated.

Thanks

PogMoThoin · 17-12-2011 10:14pm

Big Lar wrote: »

Our users wouldnt be doing anything like that, Nothing but inoccents round here PogMoThoin

It's not the customers, it's their children, they hear about Frostwire, Vuze, iMesh and other peer to peer in school from their friends. I've often come across 10-12 year olds who have installed it without their parents knowledge. The bill payer then only finds out when the Isp get pissed with all the uploading.

And it's not the bandwidth that causes problems, the massive amount of connections peer to peer opens. It will lag any wireless network, the router and the ubiquiti gear just won't cope.

Nice choice on the RB750, it's very decent router at a nice price, I have a gigabit one here for my own house. It didn't break the bank and you can always upgrade to something more powerful from Mikrotik when/if it's needed.

Sponge Bob · 17-12-2011 11:59pm

You notice a large spike then you lock down the number of concurrent tcp connections per client till you get it sorted. You forget Lar knows all his 'customers' personally not like most ISPs.

Big Lar · 19-12-2011 8:17pm

PogMoThoin wrote: »

And it's not the bandwidth that causes problems, the massive amount of connections peer to peer opens. It will lag any wireless network, the router and the ubiquiti gear just won't cope.

Its one of the reasons why we do not offer symeterical uploads.

Sponge Bob wrote: »

then you lock down the number of concurrent tcp connections per client till you get it sorted

Having read up on a number of other forums, that seems to be how other providers are handling the problem.

Sponge Bob · 20-12-2011 1:13am

If you limit per client at say 25-30 concurrents (when you get hit by a P2P hog) you will avoid the core routers getting overloaded and slow from routing tables as much as data requirements. Your worst nightmare is dopey young Zoe seeding the Xfactor christmas single or some high demand item like that.

BigPaddy might PM you something schnakier but it is for the good of all.

Big Lar · 20-12-2011 10:21am

I was also reading to leave port 80 alone as that is the one used for web browsing.
What ya think of that ?

Sponge Bob · 20-12-2011 10:44am

Yep.

bigpaddy2004 · 20-12-2011 4:34pm

Big Lar wrote: »

I was also reading to leave port 80 alone as that is the one used for web browsing.
What ya think of that ?

Do a Google search on "Butch Evans Script".

zenith · 23-12-2011 11:18pm

@bigpaddy2004 - thanks for that re script, looks like just what we will need to restore some manners if things get heavy. Saves us a huge headache.

Though, calling their mammies is also an option. ("Do you want us to tell her what DNS requests you've been making, DO YOU?!!!") :P

With regard to how far we've gotten with this - the credit is actually due to Big Lar; he's pretty much plucked the core set of punters out of thin air, done the negotiations for the high sites, installed the radios - and made sure that once you reach a certain number of committed people, the economics start to work. He's also a gtalk plague, which keeps it on the road.

Interesting things we've learned:
1. People mostly find it hard to imagine how a community group operates. They just don't grok that we like them adjusting their own alignments and running their own cables. They're suspicious. But the lights do go on eventually.

2. Our upstream providers advised us to provide a static IP for each CPE, and make the rules of the game that we're not going to hide identities. This has created blissful order in general.

3. You end up supporting a lot of kit that isn't yours in the first phase. Because 'the internet' is also internal wiring, spyware-infected laptops, a hedge that needs to be trimmed, and lots of other bits and pieces that need to work. However, over time, you get to empower people, and the problems go away. You still have to do favours, but the requirements ebb.

4. Speedtest.net is bollox. It can be gamed, and it tells lies too.

5. I echo the "everybody's helpful" thing. We have had offers of help with marketing, routing, installs; we've had more than we can use. It's not just the IT guys; I think that the co-op experience in rural areas really works to our advantage. Maybe it's a "we're not spoon fed out here" thing; but it helps, a lot.

6. Word of mouth is much more important than meetings, marketing, branding, etc. We've only had two non-connected-to-us enquiries.

More as we go, but that's my 2c for the moment.

WhosAlice · 05-01-2012 10:49pm

Just been reading this thread,

I must commend you Big Lar, its great to see someone being as proactive as this. Just goes to show people living in more rural areas are not always at the mercy of what can be "stop-gap" service measures.

Link below may be of interest, another proactive effort in their struggle for decent service in rural UK.

https://sites.google.com/site/b4rnftthbroadbandruralnorth/about-b4rn

Big Lar · 05-01-2012 11:57pm

WhosAlice wrote: »

Just been reading this thread,

I must commend you Big Lar, its great to see someone being as proactive as this. Just goes to show people living in more rural areas are not always at the mercy of what can be "stop-gap" service measures.
Link below may be of interest, another proactive effort in their struggle for decent service in rural UK.
https://sites.google.com/site/b4rnftthbroadbandruralnorth/about-b4rn

Thanks for your kind words WhosAlice but there there is a lot more than me involved, I just came up with the idea

.

Zenith above you there is the brains behind the networking on the whole project.
The good folks at www.ccbisp.net for their continued support and efforts in giving us bandwidth.
There are two local farmers that gave us a chance and allowed us to put a bit of gear up on their sheds.
From next Saturday they should be 21 users on the network who are putting their money (Via installation fee's & subscriptions) & trust in us to keep them up and running.
Volunteers, we have had a good few people volunteer their time and equipment to the project.
The folks here on Boards for throwing in their advice and pointing us in the right direction.

The B4RN project.... Now there's a crowd that should be commended.

Sponge Bob · 06-01-2012 2:37am

Single most important thing is to get 10 people who will sign up in principle at a price point of €x for equipment and €x per month for xxmbits and then post in here with a general idea of where in Ireland you are.

Big Lar is in a very rural part of the South and funny enough the backhaul could be got because he asked around.

The local network is not that complicated...one uses outdoor wifi from a high site which can go a good few km. The backhaul is the killer.

But it can be got!

WhosAlice · 17-01-2012 12:30am

No Problem Big Lar,
Good luck to you and all those involved.

funnyname · 23-01-2012 11:19pm

Great work Lar,

Looks like I'll be dependent on FWA for the many years to come unless we win the lotto. So just a quick question you might know the answer to. When fibre optic infrastructure hits more of the country will it come within range (how close does it need to come within) so that it will be of benefit to schemes like yours and the smaller FWA companies?

Oracle · 25-01-2012 2:03pm

This is really a great idea, not just for rural residents, also for urban areas, such as estates and apartment blocks. When I opened my laptop recently, there where 12 separate wifi networks broadcasting, and they where just the networks I could pick up in my kitchen, I estimate I could multiply that by at least 4 for the amount of private wifis in my area alone. The minimum cost of DSL broadband is about €40 per month. If instead everyone connected using just one neighbourhood network, the cost per household, should be less.

Big Lar · 27-01-2012 8:31pm

funnyname wrote: »

Looks like I'll be dependent on FWA for the many years to come unless we win the lotto. So just a quick question you might know the answer to. When fibre optic infrastructure hits more of the country will it come within range (how close does it need to come within)

It does not need to come that close at all, With the correct gear wireless links can do 50 - 60 miles at ease, 10GHz gear is being perfected at them moment which can reach up to 450 Mbit throughput.

Big Lar · 27-01-2012 8:34pm

Oracle wrote: »

This is really a great idea, not just for rural residents, also for urban areas, such as estates and apartment blocks. When I opened my laptop recently, there where 12 separate wifi networks broadcasting, and they where just the networks I could pick up in my kitchen, I estimate I could multiply that by at least 4 for the amount of private wifis in my area alone. The minimum cost of DSL broadband is about €40 per month. If instead everyone connected using just one neighbourhood network, the cost per household, should be less.

I dunno about that Oracle, all your neighbours would be sharing the same IP address, lotza problems down that road, on our system we allocate each user a separate IP address which can be traced back to them.

Big Lar · 24-04-2012 9:57pm

Been a while but we have been busy.

At this current time we have 32 users on our network and we are steadily growing, we have 20 users on a 1Mbs connection 10 on 2Mbs and 2 users on 4Mbs so thats a total of 48Mbs in total of bandwidth sold, that gives us a contention ratio of 5:1 and with that contention we seem to have no problems with our 10Mbs backhaul supporting that many customers.

We have had a bit of downtime here and there along the way due to various issues so we have another small connection with another operator that we can fall back on should we have any down time, although our records show that we have 99.96% of uptime over the month of April it is a inconvenience for a lot of people when we do go down so it is for this reason that we have the backup, our stats are available @ http://www.wwcbb.net/?page_id=214 for anyone thats interested.

Without going into the whole money thing we hope to have all our initial investment paid back at the end of August and from there we will use the funds to further upgrade our infrastructure, UPS's Servers and the like and possible purchase more bandwidth, perhaps 15Mbs at that stage.

Over and out.
Big Lar

RangeR · 25-05-2012 5:09pm

I'm well impressed. Well done and good luck with your community project.

efb · 25-05-2012 5:35pm

Just read this- sounds great- well done to all!

jumpin jack · 26-05-2012 5:42pm

Sponge Bob wrote: »

Single most important thing is to get 10 people who will sign up in principle at a price point of €x for equipment and €x per month for xxmbits and then post in here with a general idea of where in Ireland you are.

Big Lar is in a very rural part of the South and funny enough the backhaul could be got because he asked around.

The local network is not that complicated...one uses outdoor wifi from a high site which can go a good few km. The backhaul is the killer.

But it can be got!

Hi Big Lar,
Great to see determination paying off, how much backhaul have you available to you now?

Big Lar · 26-05-2012 9:03pm

Still on the original 10Meg, we will be debt free in sept/Oct and are hoping to purchase more bandwidth then.
at the moment we have no contention issues, if you click the link on the above post you will see our usage but down the road we will need to provide our users with more bandwidth for Netflix and the likes.

Big Lar · 03-06-2012 1:10pm

Going to expand a bit on our group.

Our reason for being:

Most houses in our area cannot avail of DSL, we had a few fixed wireless providers in the area, One of them moved from the area due to operational reasons and the other went into liquidation, in fairness to both of the providers the terrain here in West Waterford is nothing but humps and hollows and getting into all the nooks and cranny's here for them is a costly business so we were left with dongle power then a couple of got together and had a go.

It should be noted that our purpose is to enhance the broadband experience in rural Ireland and by providing service for pennies we would be only choking other operators which does not benefit the wider community so for that purpose we provide our started package of 1Mbs of bandwidth for €20.00, this is well below the quoted 6Mb for around €20.00pm that mobile operators offer. Upgrading our speed over time will still leave plenty of room for other providers to operate profitably in our area.

Wireless links:

All our gear is Ubitiquiti, there are other manufactures out there like Mikrotik but the reason that we went with it is because I had a small bit of experience with it over the past years and its priced very competitively, we have three access points at the moment comprising of two 120deg Sectors and 1 omni directional antenna, we run all 5ghz as it is unlicensed which offers less complications for us.
For the householder we have either use Nanostation M5's or the cheaper Nanostation Loco M5 for shorter and less noisy links, we also have a few point to point links for back haul where we use Nanobridges and 30dbi dishes.
Ubitiquiti boast a throughput of 150bs through their kit but thats in a perfect scenario with no noise(unwanted interference), we use a half beamwith on our kit as it doubles our signal strength but on the other side it hald the throughput which theoretically gives us 75mbs but the most I have seen acrosss or networks in speed tests is around 30 - 40Mbs.

Our Access Points:

As I have mentioned in earlier posts we have been lucky enough to be able to place equipment on a couple of farmers sheds which are located on high ground and for their use we offer the farmers a free connection, apart from them no one else gets a free connection, everyone else on the group pays including myself.
Originally we wanted to get on a mast and transmit from there but mast space is expensive and we have gotten quotes up as far as €7,000.00 per year for a bit of space so that option is ruled out, actually while I am on it: The norm for mast space seems to be between €150.00 to €300.00 per month.

We have had a bit of downtime over the last 7 months for so may reasons so we have invested in a secondary small link from another operator to provide backup, people do depend on our service so we do do our best to serve them as best we can.

Time and effort:

It took a nice bit of time at the start to get everything up and running but after that it pretty much runs itself, we do get the odd call out here and there which takes up a few hours a week but nothing major as yet.

Our project will have surplus funds from Oct/Nov onwards but we need to continue to reinvest in our links making them better and more reliable, we need UPS's on all our Access points and a proper server.

So whats in it for me I hear you ask:

Well I now have fast reliable internet, I have gotten rid of my two eircom lines and now use Voip for all my calls which is saving way more than the €40.00 per month that my Internet costs

.

Then there is the sense of achievement, I look around and say "I did that"

and of course Gemeinschaftsgefuhl

"The German word Gemeinschaftsgefuhl means feeling of community, of belonging. It means having to work at something that transcends not only one's own person, but also the small group to which one belongs. It transcends the family, one's church affiliation, one's race. It has to do with melting into or relating oneself to the community of man, or as people often name it more poetically, the brotherhood of man." (From "The Collected Works of Lydia Sicher: An Adlerian Perspective,")

Big Lar · 06-06-2012 5:30pm

One of the units on our point 2 point links burned out yesterday leaving 10 users stranded for 24 hours, finally after a good few hours of head scratching and a few spares we got it all up and running again this morning. We have put it down to a lightning strike.

Texted the few punters on the AP to keep them up to speed on the works and they were understandable enough. Public relations seems to be the key in this game

Dero · 07-06-2012 9:39am

Big Lar wrote: »

Texted the few punters on the AP to keep them up to speed on the works and they were understandable enough. Public relations seems to be the key in this game

This, this, and a million times this!

Outages are inevitable; all people want is to be kept informed.

From my own experience (Callidus/Omitel/Ripplecom) and from reading here, PR and communications seems to be the biggest bug bear of Irish broadbad customers.

funnyname · 07-06-2012 10:30am

Dero wrote: »

This, this, and a million times this!

Outages are inevitable; all people want is to be kept informed.

From my own experience (Callidus/Omitel/Ripplecom) and from reading here, PR and communications seems to be the biggest bug bear of Irish broadbad customers.

Indeed, my provider puts updates on their twitter account however when you don't have a smartphone (or no mobile coverage if you do) to access then whatchagonnado?

Big Lar · 20-06-2012 9:39pm

So I says to myself that i will part with a bit of knowledge.

As I have already mentioned we use 5.8Ghz equipment, as can be seen in the screen shot below it has about 19 channels that can be used in Ireland.
We have 3 access points which we have users connected to and two point to point links, one which connects us to our back haul and the other that provides a link between our two access points.

We live in a area with masts surrounding us on two sides and this provides us with a lot of noise (Unwanted Signals), so before we setup an access point we do a scan and select the frequency with the lowest noise, this is grand at the Access Point but the user may be at a way higher altitude and they may have interference from antenna's close to them transmitting on the same frequency, so it took us a while to cop on to that one.

We use Nanostations on all the houses try to connect our users with a signal level of under -80Dbi as that is the real minimum signal where data can be sent without packet loss, but sometimes noise levels can be around -85dbi at the users house so this poses a big problem for us, with high noise levels it really shags up the data rate of the users device an also results in packet loss, so then we have to go higher with the gear or use equipment with a stronger signal like a Nanobridge to overcome the noise, at the moment we have one such client that is in a massively high noise are and we are trying hard to get him sorted, a Nanobridge will catch a lot of wind and we are afraid that the existing pole will not be able for it so we have aluminum shields specially designed for reducing noise coming from the US which will encase the users device and hopefully protect it from background noise.

There is a nice little vid here of how it works http://www.rfarmor.com/unsk235.avi

So hopefully that should sort out that fella when it comes.

Should look something like this when tis up

Sponge Bob · 21-06-2012 8:21am

Even in a very rural area one would be surprised at the amount of 'noise' in unlicenced bands which is what Lar is using. ( You do not need a wireless licence to use them)

The most common user of these frequencies is Wifi. People with Wifi may remember that the Wifi equipment was called 802.11B in the 00's then 802.11B/G later on and now 802.11B/G/N . 802.11B used frequencies aroudn 2400mhz and G added frequencies around 5300mhz to those while the N standard, around 2008, added the capability to use 2 or more channels. N is state of the art for now. WiGig 801.11AC will be the next version rolling out this year on the exact same frequencies. More noise is guaranteed.

The simple way to get more Wifi speed was to take on more channels, or larger channels and then 2 or more channels at the same time.

Consequently an operator, even in a rural area, has to carefully ask people to use certain WiFi channels inside their houses and NOT to use certain others.

This handy table > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_WLAN_channels when compared to Lars graphic above shows Lar is using kit with a frequency of 5180 to 5700 Mhz.

Therefore domestic wifi should not use channels 36 upwards and should stick to channels 1-11 which will not interfere with the outdoor gear.

If a specific channel is not selected in the Wifi Router/Hub settings in the home the device could hop from channel to channel trying to avoid interference but randomly causing interference while it does so.

A bit of order and everybody will find a happy co existence. It probably means that the Community WISP should configure the domestic wifi router as well as install the ISP gear on their installation visit.

Wireless net · 22-06-2012 6:39pm

great work there big lar. how do you find your bandwidth usage now with all the users on there? also how do you restrict indivudual users internet speeds? is it just by setting the link speed on the hardware itself at the user end

i assume with the ubiquiti antennas you can create a point to point link
with a pair of antennas, and no other gear is required, ( ie no indoor unit needed eg like a ceragon install ?)

thanks

Big Lar · 22-06-2012 10:26pm

Wireless net wrote: »

great work there big liar

Why does every one call me a liar :-(

Anyhow's, yes there is a traffic shaping setting on the ubiquiti gear ether you can limit the upload and the download, there is also a setting where you can allow the first X amount of Mb to be downloaded uncontended, we find that setting this to 2 or 3 Mb allows for faster page loading and buffering.

As for the point to point links, yes any gear can be used for those although after reading into this myself over the last few months or so I think myself that gear like a power bridge M should be used for p2p Iinks as the narrow been width and so creates less interference.

Wireless net · 23-06-2012 12:07am

Big Lar wrote: »

Why does every one call me a liar :-(

Anyhow's, yes there is a traffic shaping setting on the ubiquiti gear ether you can limit the upload and the download, there is also a setting where you can allow the first X amount of Mb to be downloaded uncontended, we find that setting this to 2 or 3 Mb allows for faster page loading and buffering.

As for the point to point links, yes any gear can be used for those although after reading into this myself over the last few months or so I think myself that gear like a power bridge M should be used for p2p Iinks as the narrow been width and so creates less interference.

woops, just noticed this now,

sorry big lar

i assume then that you lock down the CPE equipment, so that the user cannot get onto the device and make any changes or up the speed?

Big Lar · 23-06-2012 7:02am

Yep username and password

Big Lar · 25-06-2012 9:14pm

We had a problem with a Point to Point link over the weekend, the noise seemed to have dramatically increased over the last while and this seemed to be reducing the amount of bandwidth we could put through the link, on the ubiquity gear there is an option to run a spectrum analyzer which scans a set frequency range and allows the user to select the frequency with the lowest noise.
There is a simpler scan a bit like smart phones but it only scans the channel width that the device is on, as can be seen below from 5.650 to 6.000Ghz is fairly noisy and we were on 5.660, they are mostly 20Mhz channel width channels showing up on the scan but at 5.520 the channel width is 10Mhz which we would not have picked up but for the scan, from 5.530 to 5.560 looks clear on that side of the point to point link but when we scanned from the other end of the link those frequencies were being picked up so we settled on 5.500 Ghz. By doing this we ended up with the signal gaining 12dbi in total on the signal as the noise was reduced by 5dbi and the signal strength increased by 7dbi.

Wireless Community Broadband – A how to – The Ultimate Guide

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