Happenings Around the Shop

Well yesterday it happened. Our ISP called and we opened up the building and a few hours later we had a full duplex 1.5mb symmetrical Internet connection However as I watched the line being installed I could not help but feel a twinge of sickness at the knowledge of our upcoming rf-engineering challenges. I have been working with 2.4 ghz wireless mesh networks for a couple of years now, and feel that I am starting to get a pretty good handle on the technology. However just a mesh network is not enough to create the insainly great network. the problem is that in order for the mesh topology to deliver fast, self healing, and redundant fall back service it needs multiple uplink points (ie Internet connections). So we are building a point to point network to feed multiple uplink points in the mesh . We have been working on this sub-network both in theory and in practice since the early days of SwS. However our “backhaul” network (despite apparently good signals) is drooping 1-10% of all the packets sent across it. We have tried several different and time consuming things to try and remedy this. I now believe that the problem is rf in nature (related to the radio waves and antenna). Our target date for when this HAS TO BE FIXED BY is dec 2. (yesterday). So that is why I felt a quiver while I watched large files pouring into my laptop from the freshly installed t1.
As of right now We have a pretty good plan of action. We are going to do what we know best and use 2.4 ghz equipment instead of the 5.8 ghz equipment we are currently using. we believe that this can be done in less than 24 hours. with a reasonable probability of success right off the bat. If it doesn’t it probably means extreamly late night shifts until it works. The only draw back is that the 2.4ghz radios will most likely need to be upgraded to 5.x ghz in the next couple of years. But I can live with that

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 3rd, 2005 at 11:01 pm and is filed under Aaron. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.