mpls over microwave

Fri Feb 6 02:38:42 UTC 2015

We run Dragonwave systems and have no issues at all.  MPLS in itself doesn't make a difference since the gear is a straight Ethernet link.  Just make sure your gear handles your frame sizes and tagging and you should be good.  

As long as your radio link is engineered right you should have high reliability.  The key is having enough margin to maintain links during fades.  So for example our link runs at -34 dbm and our receivers are good down to about -65 dbm at this rate.  That gives us a roughly 35 dbm margin for degradation before the modems will change modulation a to a lower speed.  Here in chicago we have seen maybe a total of an hour of weather related fade in a 10 years period on a 20 mile link running 600 Mbps.   They are very popular for low latency since they actually have less latency than fiber.  The high frequency traders pay big bucks to get on the microwaves between markets because of that trait.  Microwaves through air are faster than photons in a fiber cable.

Steven Naslund
Chicago IL

Sent from my iPhone

> On Feb 5, 2015, at 4:03 PM, Mike Hammett <nanog at ics-il.net> wrote:
> 
> Shouldn't really be any different as long as your gear supports the appropriate MTUs. 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ----- 
> Mike Hammett 
> Intelligent Computing Solutions 
> http://www.ics-il.com 
> 
> 
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> 
> From: "Scott Weeks" <surfer at mauigateway.com> 
> To: nanog at nanog.org 
> Sent: Thursday, February 5, 2015 3:55:04 PM 
> Subject: mpls over microwave 
> 
> 
> 
> Anyone doing MPLS over microwave radios? Please 
> share your experiences on list or off. 
> 
> scott 
> 