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

[Doug Kingston]

LGTM.

On Mon, Nov 8, 2021 at 10:09 PM Nigel Vander Houwen <nigel at nigelvh.com>
wrote:

> 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
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> http://mail.hamwan.net/mailman/listinfo/psdr
>
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