[HamWAN PSDR] PUBLIC COMMENTS: Expenditure for High Speed Backbone Link

[Nigel Vander Houwen]

Hello Everyone,

We’ve been making some progress in the midst of all the commotion, and are working on improving backhaul connectivity for the network. This has been a problem for us recently with running out of bandwidth on our links from the RF network out to the general internet. We’ve seen some impacts from this and one visible result that folks have asked about is that we’ve temporarily disabled the various webcams to save bandwidth.

We’ve proved out an link that should perform at several hundred megabits, spanning from a gigabit fiber connection in the Everett area to Haystack, which serves as a significant hub for a lot of the rest of the network.

This is especially valuable as we work to decommission our Gold site, which up till now has had an RF link to our edge in downtown Seattle. The loss of this backhaul, and the bandwidth constraints we’ve already been hitting left us looking for high performance options.

Haystack is already a very 5GHz busy site, and the angles dishes would need to be pointed would lead to increased interference, thus making our usual 5GHz backhaul infeasible. So we have looked to licensing a high performance 11GHz link. These are coordinated with the FCC for 10 years, and do use more expensive radios.

We expect total costs to be a bit less than $6k. Each side of the radio link is a little shy of $2k, and frequency coordination/licensing for 10 years is a bit shy of $2k. For the curious we plan to use Ubiquiti AirFiber AF-11FX radios.

The board has discussed and agreed that this is valuable for our network, and we believe is a worthwhile expenditure to support the network now and with lots of room for future growth. We have available funds to support this expense, and other growth items without straining our finances.

This email serves as notice that we intend to move forward with this project to bring massively increased bandwidth capabilities to the backbone, and is the membership’s opportunity for public comment before the decision is finalized. It will be considered finalized 24 hours after this message.

Thanks,
Nigel
HamWAN