Wireless bridge

Thu Jun 18 13:28:38 UTC 2009

On Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 09:05:56AM -0400, Peter Boone wrote:
> I'm looking for some equipment recommendations for a wireless bridge between
> two locations approximately 500-800 meters apart. The current setup for this
> company has been extremely unstable and slow. I don't have a lot of
> experience in this area so I was hoping someone could give me a few
> pointers.

We use Nortel 7230 wireless bridges and are *very* happy with them.  
They run at 5.8 GHz, 20 Mbps full duplex (really 18 Mbps data rate), 
do transparent bridging, and pass VLAN tagged frames just fine.  For 
one particular link, we continually push the full 18 Mbps and they 
work fine.  They are PoE powered via a power brick in the network 
closets, with a single Cat5 cable up to the outdoor unit which has the 
antenna integrated.  We've had very few failures over the 
years--mainly a few infancy failures shortly after installation.  We 
have about 40 units (20 links), all less than 1 km apart, most of them 
a few hundred meters across city streets.

These are the third generation of wireless bridge products we have 
used, and they far outperform the older ones, especially from a 
reliability and maintenance perspective.  We will be looking to 
upgrade these over the next few years to get more bandwidth in some 
locations, and I'm not overly optimistic about finding something that 
matches these from a reliability and ease-of-use perspective--I would 
appreciate it if you share a summary of any results you find.