WAN -- point-to-point vendors ?

Hi,

consider MikroTik RB/SXT for >200 megabits for around $200!

official site: www.routerBoard.com
aussie distributor: shop.duxtel.com.au

What are your bandwidth requirements for the point to point link?
that could cost you $15,000 to $25,000 a link.

I would like the Small building to communicate with our main building at 100MB/second or greater if possible.

I hope you mean Mbps and not MB, 100MB/s is 800Mbps. I am going to assume that the capital "B" was a mistake. Additionally, I am assuming you want 100Mbps full duplex.

The MikroTik RB/SXT  is marketed for 200Mbps, but the unit comes with one One 10/100 Ethernet port, so you will never get more than 100Mbps on transmit or receive (upload/download). Average real TCP throughput in the real world will be around 80Mbps for transmit and recieve. Special ASICs are required to maintain real TCP throughput of 100Mbps, the low-end WISP products (Ubiquiti and Mikrotik) just can not match that against some of the higher end products. For the short distance you have, the MikroTik RB/SXT is the best on the market at this point. The Ubiquiti Nanobridge M services (M2/M5) claim 150Mbps of real TCP throughput; they too have one 10/100 interface, so you will never get 150Mbps on transmit or receive, you will get roughly 70Mbps on transmit and receive in the real world. I would not use these on carrier class networks, and if carrier class is what you are looking for here are some vendors, but they are no where near your budget:

Bridwave FE60 - List Price: $9995.00 Link
¿Full-rate, full-duplex 100Mbps Ethernet, upgradeable to gigabit
Proxim 60250-QB-US 100Mbps Full Duplex link -  $10,465.00
Airmux-400 Tri-band Integrated Links - $8000

You can find some bridgea that utilize the MIMO and OFDM technology that will give you an aggregate of 200 - 300Mbps with a gigabit interface that you should be able to acheive 100Mbps upload and download. These have special ASICs that acheive the speeds you are looking for.

Name:  Motorola PTP 250 Integrated, 5.8 GHz (FCC) Complete Link - WB3720AA  
Price:  $4,995.00
 
Hand down, the PTP 250 is the best on the market if high quality is what you are looking for.

If you are interested on reading on ASIC design for wireless:

http://www.maxim-ic.com/products/asics/wireless/

The Ubiquiti and Mikrotik radios use embedded hardware that contain no special ASICs, so keep that in mind.

Good Luck.

Billy

for 200 bucks a link, you can buy a few of them and aggregate ;-)

Most link aggregation protocols, such as LACP or PaGP do NOT load balance based on performance; meaning that if one link reaches 100 percent utilization, the second link takes over the additional load. You are not going to get the load balancing like one would expect between two hosts over a single connection; it is load distribution, not load balancing. There are a few hash algorithms available; however, most do not help a single connection between two hosts that utilize more than one physical link. Link Aggregation are for multiple connections and distribute the load, so, If you want faster speed between two hosts on a single connection you move up to the next available bandwidth. If this does not apply to the traffic patterns mentioned, then it will work, but does not work for most applications.

Billy

Hey Billy,

I'm talking about 802.3ad kind of link aggregation here - as in a true per-packet round-robin approach.

Not sure if you are familiar at all with the MikroTik routerOS platform, but it does have some very cool and flexible applications.  The kind of link aggregation that I (so flippantly ;-) refer to above actually does require additional equipment - sorry if I seemed a bit misleading :-}

By using a pair of cheap $50 RB/750 routers at each end of the link, it is actually possible to implement a true per-packet-multipath link aggregation across 2, 3 or even 4 links!  But you do, of course, have to battle the usual kind of spectrum contention issues resulting from trying to run multiple 40MHz channels at the same time in close proximity! :-D

And also, admittedly, the total bandwidth available is still only a multiple of the slowest link ;)

Cheers!