Why upgrade?

[olympicridge]

I have an AP350 with VxWorks version 12.02T1. What IOS version would I upgrade to and what are the advantages?

[john.preves]

It depends on what you are doing with it. If it is sitting on your desk at home and you only use it for personal use, upgrading is kind of pointless unless you just like breaking things that aren't broken...that's different.

If you are in an enterprise situation upgrading will allow you to use IOS for starters, but depending on version you can enjoy WPA2 security, centralized management...etc..

Yours however, most likey still has an 802.11b (only) radio in it so, I wouldn't worry about upgrading just to see what happens.

[olympicridge]

Thanks for the reply. I use the AP350 on a long haul (12 mi) path and it connects to about 40 WGB devices. It appears that the thruput is slowing down at times so I wondererd if using a version of IOS instead of VxWorks would speed things up.

Otherwise I need to replace the AP with something newer and faster. Any suggestions?

[john.preves]

assuming everything works well as far as the path goes, 12 miles is probably pushing it, the best case scenario here would be a 5.5Mbps half duplex bridge between two points. 40 of anything on either side would be kind of painful. At some point you will upgrade yourself out of a bridge, I don't remember when bridge mode stopped...you would want to look into that.

is this a point to point link? what antennas are on either side? do you have a solid link? Is there plenty of fade margin after the link budget to ensure. If the link is sketchy, nothing you can upgrade to that will help.

If the link is rock solid, then you may have overloaded/ under-planned the use of the link and you may need to start looking at upgrading your bridges to something that can provide faster speeds than 5.5 half duplex.

[john.preves]

also, if the link used to work and you didn't overload it with clients and now its having issues, I would check all the connectors, weatherproofing and all physical aspects for damage, wear, water and make sure all these things are good. If you open a connector and see green, or shake water out of it (seriously) then you have issues you need to address.

[olympicridge]

Thanks for the reply. I'm not sure what you mean by "bridge mode stopped" how do I look into that? This is a point to multi-point link with diversity Cisco 13.5 dB Yagis at the AP end and 24 dB grids on the client sides. The link is pretty solid altho there are some 1 second drop outs about once or twice a week. Typical client receive levels are -74 dBm, slow fades are about 8 dB.

I now beleive I have oversubscribed the system because I dropped off several clients the other day during a test and speed returned to nominal which is about 4 mb/s symetrical. Client devices are a mix of 1310 and 350 WGBs. Any other thoughts would be appeciated. Thanks.

[john.preves]

Way back when you could use an AP in bridge mode. They don't let you do that anymore - you have to go buy a bridge.

If you could somehow make the end of your link in the middle and shoot out in direcions that were less than 6 miles...I like this...

http://www.bridgewave.com/products/default.cfm

that is exciting but you have to re figure your links and maybe purchase a license for 80GHz.