Today we found an issue which has been causing us problems for a few days on one of our backup wireless links, normally it's not needed and has been in place for about 4 years, but when a primary radio failed on Friday this link came up and started working, kind of.
The AP which this link hangs off runs two other sites for us and as soon as this link sprung into action and started doing some decent traffic the other two sites died a horrible death.
After replacing radios, antennas, frequency swapping and doing pretty much everything we could we just couldn't get around what seemed to be interference away from this AP.
We ended up dropping the bandwidth to these sites to get them stable and after doing more investigation after hours found that one of the sites was the one causing issues.
After visiting the site this morning to replace the radio we found that somebody, and possibly somebody on this list as it's Mikrotik gear, has slapped a 30dbi Mikrotik dish with a Netmetal strapped to it just 1 metre away from our gear, to make it worse they have run their signal path right across ours when there were many different mounting options on this building, it's just sad to see that people don't give one toss about others in the industry sometimes.
With a 30dbi dish and Netmetal I am sure they are running illegal power, and this explains perfectly our interference issue.
Just how somebody can knowingly fire a signal right across you just 1 metre away flabbergasts me.
If you run Mikrotik gear and you have gear in Bella Vista NSW you might just be the person I don't like now.
For everybody's sake please make sensible decisions in the unlicensed wireless space, only use the power you really need, and don't cross peoples paths, choose a more sensible mounting location.
If we all play fair in this tight space we can all make a dollar and have happy customers.
Regards
Paul
