Activating Etherchannel on point to point Antenas

[Dan Glory]

Hi,

I recently installed a ubiquiti litebeam on 2 cisco switches as a bridge.

everything is working fine, should i activate etherchannel on both ports?

[balaji.bandi]

If they are bridged and Layer2 - then you use port-channel.

[Karsten Iwen]

An etherchannel can increase the availability but will not increase the throughput as you will never hit the 1Gig barrier.

[Joseph W. Doherty]

"An etherchannel can increase the availability but will not increase the throughput as you will never hit the 1Gig barrier."

While it's true Etherchannel doesn't provide additional bandwidth per flow, it does provide more aggregate bandwidth, for example, rather than two flows be limited to sharing the bandwidth of one link, it's possible each of those two flows could be on its own link.

Reason I mention "possible", with Etherchannel, two flows might still share the same link while another Etherchannel link is going totally unused.

On "average" dual Etherchannel provides about an 50% effective (aggregate) bandwidth boost.

[Karsten Iwen]

I am completely with you, but he will connect a wireless bridge. Whatever he does, there will never be over 1Gig on the Ethernet side with actual wireless technology.

[Joseph W. Doherty]

OP didn't specify what wireless standard is being supported, although that might be implied by equipment named as ubiquiti litebeam, which doing a quick search for, found one product listing 100 Mbps hand-offs but up to 450 Mbps throughput.

That aside, though, my reading of WiFi 6 (IEEE 802.11ax), with the WiFi 6E variants, using the 6 GHz spectrum, can provide up to 9,608 Mbps, so I wonder whether "Whatever he does, there will never be over 1Gig on the Ethernet side with actual wireless technology." still holds true.  The WiFi 6 and 6E standards have been out for a year or two, and a quick search does seem to show WiFi 6 devices do exist.

BTW, I'm also reading, as soon as next year WiFi 7 may provide up to 40 Gbps, of course, that's not available now.

[Karsten Iwen]

These values are on the Wireless side and are heavily reduced by overhead. With 6GHz the 1Gig barrier is broken, but for now this is only relevant for indoor use. To get theoretically above 1 Gig, you need wide channels, highest MCS rates and many spatial streams. All of these are not available on the device that the OP uses.

[Joseph W. Doherty]

"All of these are not available on the device that the OP uses."

Likely true.

"With 6GHz the 1Gig barrier is broken, but for now this is only relevant for indoor use."

You know that for a fact across all vendors, or just Cisco's wireless products?

Putting aside the question of whether wireless can break gig, OP really asked whether there would be a benefit to having two wireless channels in an Etherchannel setup.  I understand your "I am completely with you . . " also includes there's some possible benefit, beyond redundancy, correct?

[Karsten Iwen]

Outdoor use needs an AFC infrastructure to coordinate which frequencies are allowed at a specific place. It seems there is some progress and we will see some outdoor solutions soon. This is across the vendors.

The agreement was on the general way etherchannels work. But no, other than redundancy, I don’t see any benefit. And we also don’t know anything about the uplink.

And I understand the question as if the etherchannel is potentially between the ubiquity and the switch and not between the switch and multiple bridges.

[Joseph W. Doherty]

"AFC infrastructure"

Sorry, I'm not a wireless expert and am unfamiliar with that term, searching for that term on the Internet I didn't find anything that seemed relevant.

"It seems there is some progress and we will see some outdoor solutions soon."

Only looking at Ubi's wireless products, they do seem to currently offer multiple 60 GHz external bridge products, some claiming up to 6 Gbps, in their USA Store.  So none of these cannot be easily used, e.g. even between a pair of close building on the same property?

Again, not being a wireless expert, I can misunderstand much, but I thought some low end external wireless bridges could basically use the same technology as internal WAPs, most importantly not exceeding power transmission standards.  I.e. such wireless bridges can obtain the same bandwidth as internal similar technology WAP but are often very range limited.  What additional distance such bridges do obtain, I understood, was most due to using very directional hi gain antennas.  (Much of Ubi's production literature shows dB signal diagrams.)

Anyway, reading about the LiteBeam bridges, I think I came across that series maxes out at 450 Mbps, and didn't appear to offer multiple network ports.  So your: "And I understand the question as if the etherchannel is potentially between the ubiquity and the switch and not between the switch and multiple bridges." does indeed make one wonder whether there are parallel bridges.  If so, I assume we would agree Etherchannel might be used to leverage two wireless paths.  (However, then I wonder about possible interference between two sets of wireless bridges set in closely together in parallel.)

[Karsten Iwen]

Extreme Networks has a quite good blog post on AFC: https://www.extremenetworks.com/extreme-networks-blog/wi-fi-6e-and-automated-frequency-coordination-afc-what-you-need-to/

The 60 GHz solutions are a completely different thing. WaveTunnel is a new interesting product: https://www.techpowerup.com/304774/airvine-announces-new-wavetunnel-product-line-to-meet-rapidly-growing-indoor-broadband-requirements This for sure needs more that a Gig.

The WLAN technology for indoor and outdoor is basically the same, but there are differences in allowed power and channels. In the end it comes down to the product in use.

But for the LiteBeam, I only looked at the wireless specs to see if this device can anyhow come near a Gig. I just assumed two Ethernet ports with this question ... Having two parallel bridges will have some more challenges. But I would assume that with sufficient distance and a good channel selection this should work. Here, my gut feeling is that two routed links with ECLB would be a better solution than Etherchannel. But I would be interested to hear how a channel works.

 @Dan Glory Can be specify a little bit more detailed what you want to do?

[Joseph W. Doherty]

Thank you for the additional information!

One question I couldn't find an easy answer to, is what, in the USA, is currently legally required?  (Most of what I found were proposals, including from the FCC, but, again, not what are the legal restrictions, if any, right now.)

Much of my quick reading helped bring me up to date on WiFi and helped me much better understand the points you were making in your posts.

One "nice" overview of WiFi 6E I found, is Cisco's White Paper on the subject.

One interesting factoid in that paper was mention of there possibly being a very low power 6E setup, that might be used indoors or outdoors, without requiring any AFC.

"The 60 GHz solutions are a completely different thing."

Laugh, quickly reading so much, I didn't notice that 6 GHz vs. 60 GHz were "correctly" different.  Thought I was dealing with the same wireless spectrum band, although not necessary the same modulation technology, i.e. just either 6 was missing its zero, or 60 had a typo being an additional zero.

Again, thank you for your posts - very informative.