802.11 based WISP hardware

Fri Mar 27 11:40:35 UTC 2015

In my experience in the rural areas around DFW most of the smaller operations, such as I had until recently, used Mikrotik equipment. Around here SkyBeam has bought out all of the small and most of the large WISPs. They retired the Mikrotik equipment in favor of Motorola Canopy originally. I was told the Canopy line may have been sold to someone else. I think Cambium.

The Mikrotik equipment I had at the top of my 96 foot tall tower was rock solid. Never a hiccup in years of service in all kinds of weather. Of course I did a proper standards based installation including bonding and grounding. Proper installation makes a big difference no matter what you use.

Kenneth M. Chipps Ph.D.

-----Original Message-----
From: NANOG [mailto:nanog-bounces at nanog.org] On Behalf Of Jason Lixfeld
Sent: Friday, March 27, 2015 6:00 AM
To: NANOG
Subject: 802.11 based WISP hardware

Hi all,

I’m looking to gather some public opinion, links and pointers around the current landscape of WISP hardware vendors.  I’m familiar with Cisco, Ruckus, AdTran, Motorola and Aruba (HP) but I’m wondering who else is out there that folks have used with success.  My main areas of interest are around controller based (hardware or virtual (in-house, not off-net cloud based)) systems that have a range of indoor & outdoor 802.11AC PoE capable APs.  The controller(s) would be capable of tunnelling traffic from the APs for one or more SSIDs, support per-SSID captive portals and unique, intra-SSID captive portals.  In a perfect world, an on-board DHCP server would be super handy too.  The system should support CAPWAP, but some proprietary alternative is also fine, the usual suite of security protocols per SSID, reliable intra-SSID AP roaming algorithms and multi-SSID capable.

Thanks in advance.