Hello all,
My team is working on technical and technological specifications of a
document for the deployment of Internet service on public frequencies in
rural areas. We welcome your thoughts on the topic in terms of previous
experiences and, well sure, you recommendation in terms of equipment. You
should note that the environment in question is very mountainous with very
precarious infrastructure conditions: no electricity, poor access, etc. We
would like to deploy a service at minimal cost, using mainly open source
software.
All comments, suggestions, recommendations, draft, success stories are well
come.
Feel free to contact me for additional information.
Warms regards,
Georges-Keny PAUL
Eric,
Thanks for your reply. We're located in Haiti (Caribbean), we use basically
the same template than rural S. America and Africa. I'm waiting for you.
Regards,
Georges-Keny PAUL
Check out the openbts and tier wireless projects.
Ubiquiti Networks - www.ubnt.com
I have deployed numerous rural wireless provider nets with a variety
of technologies and vendors and this is by far, the most cost
effective and reliable last mile solution.
IMHO, based on testing and real life lessons learned, unlicensed is
the only way to go in rural. The benefits of licensed frequencies are
"typically" lost in rural environments as there aren't many contending
devices. The above N based equipment performs roughly at the same
level as fixed wimax, without the expense of the wimax chipsets. Of
course I am generalizing a bit and each deployment has it's own
requirements and challenges to be considered.
John
+1 UBNT.
Can not beat the price/performance of the equipment. ($160 for a pair of dual-pol 802.11n equipment).
- Jared
Another +1 UBNT. We're using the NanoStation2 to deliver 802.11g to
remote camps in Afghanistan. They advertise a 60 deg LOS signal but it
seems to do much better. Supposedly they will reach 15 km but we've
never tried to use them that far. What's really neat is they come
ready to mount with some heavy duty zip ties.
I'm also a fan of the Cisco Aironet 1310, but we're using the built-in
omni-directional antennae so the range isn't as nice as the Ubiquity
and they cost about five times as much. The terminations are RG6 and
the mount kit comes with the cable and weather strips to protect the
terminations. The Ubiquity by comparison is all PoE so you'll want to
use loom to protect the ethernet cable.
I would venture to say that the UBNT omni-directional devices (eg.
PicoStation2HP) have better range than the aforementioned Aironet
1310.
Jeff
UBNT is fine if you need a bridged network, using them in junction to MikroTik's RouterBOARDs will give you all of the tools you will need to be successful as well. Routing, traffic shaping etc. Contact me off-list if you need pre-built / configured solutions with either hardware.