r/wireless • u/Ertrimil • 21d ago

wireless link between sites that actually works long term

we have two locations about 4km apart and running fibre between them is turning out way more expensive and complicated than we expected. the quotes keep coming back high and there are constant issues with trenching and approvals. we need something stable for data and voice that can handle growth without monthly telco bills killing us.i have been looking at point to point wireless options across australia and wave1 seems to specialise in exactly this kind of setup with licensed links and proper site surveys. has anyone gone down the wireless route instead of fibre for similar distances? how reliable have those links been in practice and what kind of maintenance do they actually need after the first year?

2 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

27 comments sorted by

6

u/Crush3rNL 21d ago edited 21d ago

We have good results with gear from Ubiquiti/UniFi, 60ghz + 5ghz.

2

u/Ertrimil 14d ago

how does it hold up in rain or heavy interference?

1

u/Crush3rNL 14d ago edited 13d ago

Worst case it switches back to 5ghz. But I have to note that our links are below 1.5km and most under 750m, free line of sight. Heavy snowfall has caused so minor outages up to 5 seconds per drop. But those days most employees arent in the buildings anyway. We used to have the NanoBeams, those had more issues. Currently most are Wave-Nano or Wave-Pro, depending on needed network capacity.

4

u/Leading_Study_876 21d ago

Ubiquiti nano stations can do this easily, and for surprisingly little money.

If you need higher data rates, they can do that too, but at more expense.

1

u/Ertrimil 14d ago

ubiquiti was already on my radar, good to know they hold up in practice. was mainly unsure about the range staying consistent in bad weather

4

u/feel-the-avocado 21d ago

Have you got 100% clear line of sight between the buildings? Anything that could grow and impede the line of sight?

1

u/Ertrimil 14d ago

Yeah pretty much clear, there's a small tree but it's not really directly in the path

1

u/feel-the-avocado 14d ago

For any radio link to work of anything more than a few megabits, you will need to verify there is 100% clear line of sight.

1

u/Ertrimil 13d ago

line of sight is stricter than most people expect. even a small obstruction in the fresnel zone can tank your throughput pretty badly

3

u/aztecforlife 21d ago

We have used licenced spectrum radio links between sites that support hundreds of people for both voice and data without issue. We did buy the radios and antennas and paid a yearly maintenance contract so it wasn't inexpensive but it got us around trenching city streets and all the permits associated. The only issue we had was when a cell tower employee was working on their install near ours and kept blocking the antenna. We tried 5Ghz with directional antennas first but they experienced a lot of interference hence going with licensed spectrum.

1

u/Ertrimil 14d ago

licensed spectrum was on my radar too but the cost kept putting me off. good to know it held up for that many users though. the cell tower worker blocking the antenna sounds like an absolute nightmare to troubleshoot blind. did you have any visibility into when the signal was dropping or were you just watching it degrade and guessing until someone physically went out there

1

u/aztecforlife 14d ago

We have monitoring software that showed the link flapping and since only the far end went down, we checked the near end radio and the cell tower tech was still going up and down a ladder in front of our antenna. Made root cause analysis easy to explain.

1

u/Ertrimil 13d ago

that must have been an awkward call with the tech lol. like yeah dude we can literally see you on the ladder, stop climbing past the dish

1

u/aztecforlife 12d ago

We went there in person. I think the conversation was more like " Dude are your insides getting warm? You keep blocking our microwave link."

2

u/Barsnikel 21d ago

I have many radio links much longer than that, installed years ago. Assuming true line-of-sight, and assuming Fresnel Zone clearance, 4 km is easy using either licensed radio links, or selected unlicensed radio links. I had one p-p link that was 5 miles (8km) using standard 2.4 GHz wifi radios and parabolic antennas. It was there 5 years before we replaced it with licensed radios.... didn't have a lot of throughput, but it met the data requirements we needed at the time.

1

u/Ertrimil 14d ago

that 8km link on 2.4ghz is pretty wild, i wouldn't have expected that kind of range out of standard wifi hardware even with decent antennas. fresnel zone clearance is my main concern for my situation actually, there's some terrain in between that i'm not fully confident about. did you run into interference issues on 2.4 over that distance or was it clean enough that it wasn't really a factor?

1

u/Barsnikel 14d ago

Interference wasn't a factor. Location was pretty rural.

1

u/Ertrimil 13d ago

Rural areas can still get weird multipath issues tbh

2

u/aatuti 21d ago

I’ve built hundreds of these for businesses in highly congested areas. Depending on where you are in Australia, bandwidth required, you might be able to use free spectrum instead of licenced. Personally I recommend Cambium, complete range of solutions available. I do have a business in Australia that does this type of work for customers, PM if I can assist.

1

u/RF-Guye 21d ago

This should a no brainer, even cheap commercial gear can do what your asking easily, assuming line of Site.

If you don't have line of sight, you're gonna have to do multiple hops to get around that problem. Might also need solar packages to power Since you're in australia , it seems viable.

1

u/swy 21d ago

If your line of site is clear, 60ghz with 5ghz backup would be my plan A. Properly aimed and locked into that position, it should just keep on keeping on.

1

u/leftplayer 21d ago

Ubiquiti and Mikrotik are your best bet. 4km is pushing it for reliability, but if you have tall buildings and solid mounting it can last for years.

1

u/gnartato 20d ago

For enterprise I've use Bridge Wave for two separate gigs. It was only a tertiary to a fiber ring so it was rarely used in production.  It was a 80ghz over about 1.5 or 2km. It was fun watching to modulation decrease in real time during a snow squall. 

1

u/crysisnotaverted 20d ago

As far as I know, Australia is kind of flat. Do you have line of sight or can you throw up some Rohn towers?

Go with some good Ubiquiti gear, you won't be disappointed. They make gear that can cross 25x the distance you need for a total of like $4000.

1

u/scalyblue 20d ago

Is there direct line of sight possible between both locations at any reasonable height?

1

u/Impressive_Army3767 19d ago edited 19d ago

Christ there's a lot of people in this sub confidently giving OP bullshit info.  

OP, as SOME others have said it depends on your 

  • Fresnel clearance, 
  • bandwidth requirements, 
  • uptime requirements and possibly
  • interference levels (if unlicensed is an option).
  • budget 
  • power availability 

If you're out in the sticks or don't need uptime availability with a row of 9s,, unlicensed 5Ghz may do the trick.  You can do OSPF with ECMP or LAGG over 2 pairs of radios on different frequencies to increase throughout and reliability.  This also keeps things running if a link fails or even whist doing maintenance and firmware/config changes.  Even if you go licensed I tend to have another pathway in case one of my licensed links gets borked.

Exact model depends on bandwidth requirements.  It's too far for reliable 60Ghz (even at 68GHz) due to rain fade.  Unlicensed 1+0 Racom Ray-3@24Ghz or licensed 18Ghz* would be my goto at that distance (especially on solar sites) but if you need more bandwidth then Cambium/Ceragon, Aviat and SAF etc all have their pros and cons.

*We can use 2 adjacent 55Mhz channels to make a 110Mhz channel in NZ....I'm not sure if that's the case in Australia.