On the moment ‘interop’ mode is the only available working mode and for the bulk of migrating operators towards Mimosa brand they have to go this route anyway. (Unless you have the resources to change overnight…)
We work with one A5-14 that has now some 55 CPE’s able to connect to it where 50 are Mikrotik SXT’s (both ‘n’ as ‘ac’ models) and one Mimosa C5 and 4 other Mikrotik boards…
All SXT’s or other boards are within some 400mtrs distance to the tower and ‘hit’ the AP with a signal of -52 to - 58dB.
We adjusted the output power of the SXT’s to that level to make sure they all still can ‘hear’ each other. A very important issue to have the RTS/CTS system working in the CSMA (=legacy 802.11) protocol!
We’d tried lower output on the CPE’s to reduce a ‘noise’ level at the AP but it seems the CPE’s couldn’t ‘hear’ eachother all anymore and some units that ran a data stream brought the whole network down. Typical ‘hidden node’ issue. (Network collisions).
In the tdma world it was and still is, important to have good directional CPE antenna’s to get the best signals from the AP and at the same time to isolate as much as possible unwanted signal for other directions. After all, the AP directs when CPE is to send and receive. CPE’s have no need to ‘listen’ to other CPE’s in the same PtMP network. The better the signal coming from AP is isolated from anything else the better (S/N!)
Hence many metal dish type of CPE’s probably worked better then a standard Mikrotik SXT since they only have a plastic case.
But imho this disadvantage in tdma networks now works out to be an advantage in a basic CSMA system where it is needed that all CPE’s can hear eachother’s RTS/CTS messages to avoid network collisions!!
Off course spectrum around and background noise at the working frequency best should be as low as possible but since the Mimosa AP can do with lower S/N ratios as the Mikrotik AP’s to achieve certain MCS rates and overall the Mimosa chipset and software seems to deal better with the spectrum then the Mikrotik the pro of this outweighs the cons.
We saw that the replacement of two Omnitiks for one A5-14 for the same clients with lower signals deliver higher mcs rates. Due this and the fact with re-designing the 2 x 20Mhz channel (that had to be separated) we now work with one 40Mhz channel (well, we already tried 80Mhz too!) and we have an better overall network.