Quick review: Very happy with Mimosa

Products
#1

I just wanted to jump in here quick to say how extremely satisfied I am with our Mimosa gear so far. We’ve barely had any issues with our Mimosa links since we’ve deployed them over the past several months; I can’t quite say the same for our Ubnt gear over the past year.

To date we’ve deployed:

B5 link
4 B5-lite links
A5-360
A5c
4 C5’s

The only reason we have 4 b5-lite links is because I was waiting for the A5c’s to be released and didn’t want to blow $900 on an A5, only to take it down a month later. I’m now going to swap out some of those B5-lite links with C5’s and I’ll reuse the B5-lites for some of our smaller POP’s.

Back to the review: I say “barely had any issues” because our B5 links have locked up on us twice and I’ve also had a B5-lite link go down. I blame the B5-lite issue on myself for not grounding it properly. Power cycling fixed it; I was a little worried that I had killed it at the time. However, I’m still not sure why our B5 link has locked up twice now. It’s grounded properly and only a power cycle will bring it back up.

What I’m most satisfied with though is Mimosa’s performance predictability and link stability.

With our Ubnt gear, the performance is literally all over the chart. They’ll be pulling 200 Mbps one second and then 20 Mbps the next. Links that are supposed to be pushing 300 Mbps will limit themselves to 500 kbps for seemingly no reason and only issuing a reboot fixes the issue (temporarily until it happens again 3 weeks later).

I’ve yet to have any of our A5’s, B5’s, or C5’s demonstrate any kind of similar behavior. They just work and the management interface is crystal clear; the spectrum graph is also very clear and helps tremendously. I’ve resorted to setting most of our channels manually though, the auto channel changes into crowded channels at times and I’m not sure why.

All in all, very satisfied.

Can’t wait to replace the rest of our ~35 Ubnt clients with new Mimosa gear.

3 Likes
#2

Hello Christopher,

I would like to implement the Micro Pop topology in an Urban scenario.

Like a physical star topology, I think to create a single point from which put many PtP B5 or B5-lite links to every Micro Pop covering each one a small area, tipically 4 km diameter each with a small overlapping.

Can you share your review with A5-360 ? There are 2 models: 14 dB and 18 dB. What about you tryed ?

#3

The 18dB model has a slight down-tilt, so it’s best suited for environments where the AP is ~2-3 stories above your client radios. The 14dB model has 0 down-tilt. I’ve been using the A5c’s primarily, but we do have one A5-360 up and used the 18dB model because it’s on top of a 4 story building (and on a hill).

I essentially have the “star topology”, using B5’s/B5-lite’s for backhaul between our primary Pop and each satellite Pop.

#4

When you tell “2-3 stories above” at how much meters above CPE’s it stay ?

For example, consider an essentially 10 meters average’s high of customers buildings, how many meters above you think it should be the A5-360-18 ?

#5
#6

I have loved that post. It’s really opened my mind.

Thank you Chirs.

:beer:

#7

Another question for you.

What about interference if many Mini-POP should slightly overloap each other ?

I’ve read about the squelch is able to silent the noise around CPE itself, but it really working ?