Pt2Pt Ubiquiti Card Backhauls vs. Trango Backhaul/Canopy

[wispwest]

Hey we pay out the *** for "real" backhauls such as Trango, Canopy, Dragonwave, etc. My question is, what makes these so expensive compared to just using a ubnt in a Mikrotik Board? We have a Trango T45 (54Mbps) feeding a tower here in town. I set up another backhaul going to it from the same P2P locations just using a athero's cards and Mikrotik Boards in Nstream, and I get TWICE the speed, for a quarter of the price! Go to streakwave website and look at the price on their backhauls, then look at the price on the mini-pci cards. It seems like you can achieve the same quality/speed for $1000's less just putting it together with ubnt/athero's cards and mikrotik boards. Is there something I'm missing?

[WHT]

Pick whatever adage you want...

"Nobody got fired for buying IBM"...Nobody got fired for buying Motorola Canopy.

"Brand loyalty"...Brand name drugs still cost more then generic.

"If its too good to be true, it isn't"...expect for Linux and UBNT.

"Open-source movement is a communist affront to capitalism and should not be allowed to interfere in the profitable business of proprietary software"...Better dead than red.

[J_Hughes]

WHT said it pretty well...

You know the pros:
* Faster (unless you buy the N-draft 10k+ systems)
* Cheaper
* Replaceable parts
* SNMP Monitoring with "The Dude" for FREE :)

Cons:
* Every feature doesn't work right out of the box
- usually a user problem but sometimes software, where as with Trango and Motorolla you pay for that turnkey type of system that just WORKS

* regular WiFi signals vs WiMax signals
- WiMax is designed with often proprietary signal rates/algorithms that do not communicate with standard WiFi - because of this it simply shows up as noise to standard WiFi applications - Motorolla's signals are famous for "not playing nice" with other systems.
- however, there is always the option to turn off CSMA, but you can wreck your own links that way if they are on the edge of the channel

*OTHERS Sugestions? can't think of any more at the moment

[J_Hughes]

Hi,

Ran across this post in dslreports.com, seems like a great little synopsis.


Understanding mikrotik and its usages is something of a science. You have to understand your needs, wants, requirements, and abilities to be able to fully utilize mikrotik in all of its forms.

In some cases I have clients that use MT just at the bottom of their towers, leaving the APs down to dumb bridges, such as Tranzos/Trangos, etc. Depending on your loading, doing routing across multiple ports on a nice MT at the bottom of the tower is a great way to go.

In other cases, having the cheapest possible tower, say, one 5.8 gig backhaul into a tower, and three 120* sectors, is sometimes the best way to start. With mikrotik, in this configuration, you can still ROUTE everything, that so that�€™s a great way of going.

The conversation fails to really answer the question that superdog originally asked. That question, why we run MT when there are other, less complex systems available.

To answer that, it really comes down to how you run you business, do you look at features first, or price. Maybe you look at serviceability, or manufacture support over both of them, but if that was the case, Cisco would be all over the place in the WISP industry.

Something else to consider, is that anyone who is putting up these �€œdumb�€� access-points that are not CALEA complainant, that is a requirement now, that new or replacement devices be CALEA compliant.

Now that said, as some people have mentioned, some clients prefer to have a mikrotik just at the bottom of the tower, terminate their PPPoE sessions, and do their OSPF. Some prefer to have the firewall ability along with the ability to terminate the PPPoE sessions they have at the client! It really all comes down to, WHAT YOU WANT, what you can service, and how you deal with it.

Replying to a post about polling feature, I would have never used nstream as a P2mP AP. Also, something else, 802.11b is only going to scale to around 40-50 clients depending on the bandwidth you give them. Another factor is if they are throttled at the client site, or at the AP.

The MAIN reason I personally use MT as an access point, is simple flexibility. I can put different radio card in, and go from 900 MHz to 2.4, even 4.9, 5.2 and 5.8. I can firewall customers at the AP, and even do some PPPoE termination if I wish.

There is something to be said about just going up and replacing a box and you are done. I do that, I have a MT in a NEMA, if I have an issue; I replace the whole box, then deal with if it is a card, pigtail etc, after work on it while it is on the ground.

Something on the mikrotik support comments, I have never had an e-mail that had not been responded too. Unlike a linksys, that can only run a few different ways, your mikrotik can do almost limitless things. However, just like any good engineer, you have to know how to put the pieces of the puzzle together. Cisco does not offer to help you configure your entire network under their support. There support is to help when the product fails, vs. telling you how to use the product. There are a number of classes for Cisco gear if you wish to become proficient in using them, just the same as mikrotik has a number of classes that you can take to become proficient in mikrotik. I would be happy to recommend them.

So, if you want all of the features, for a cheap price, with endless options, and infinite configuration abilities, then mikrotik is your product. However, that said, sometimes, you don�€™t need all of the features, etc, then, going with another product is also fine, simpler and easier to support. Ether way, I will be glad to help you out with any of your MT issues.

Dennis Burgess, CCNA, A+, N+, mikrotik Certified
www.mikrotikconsulting.com

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r18496460-The-great-question

Bravo