AirFiber is a new revolution from Ubiquiti. Test results

Colleagues!

At your numerous requests, we tested the first AirFiber flight from Ubiquiti brought to Russia. On the official website, the manufacturer claims that AirFiber is capable of transmitting up to 1,400 Mbit / s over a distance of more than 13 km. This is many times higher than the capabilities of modern RRL (1 + 0) and, of course, we waited with AirFiber with great impatience. And so, the first batch arrived, and we immediately conducted tests at real distances.



Ubiquiti company and its products are unlikely to be presented to our readers.
For 5 years now, Ubiquiti has been offering us reliable, high-performance and low-cost solutions of the last mile of Airmax and Wi-Fi solutions for home and office.
Ubiquiti solutions with highly directional antennas Nanobridge and Powerbridge are often used as low-cost trunk radio channels.
However, every year the requirements for the capacity of the main channels are growing every year, and the capacity of 100-150 Mbit simplex is often not enough even for a demanding customer, not to mention the main channels.
The massive use of torrent-clients also places high demands on the packet performance of the radio channel.
Today, Ubiquiti offers a new solution for building high-performance highways, combining base stations, connecting cable network segments.

AirFiber is a convenient, high-performance and compact solution for the operator's core network.
The AirFiber radio relay station allows you to get out of the box a reliable 750 Mbit full duplex radio channel for any type of traffic at an unprecedented low cost.
Despite its low cost, AirFiber has all the features of modern radio relay stations:
• High bandwidth
• High batch performance, no drop in speed with small packet size
• Use of high performance modulations and XPIC MIMO technology to increase channel capacity and efficient use of the radio environment

• Adaptive modulation, which allows to obtain a radio channel that is optimal in terms of capacity and reliability.
• Low power consumption (up to 50 watts)
The package includes everything you need to deploy a channel:
• The device itself with built-in antennas
• Full set of fasteners
• Power Injector over twisted pair
• Instructions to the system
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AirFiber is equipped with a Gigabit Ethernet interface for transmitting traffic and inband control, as well as an additional interface for out of band control via a backup link.
Another interface, AUX, allows you to connect a voltmeter through a simple adapter and adjust it according to its readings (in fact, this is an analogue of the built-in RSSI indicator)


The adjustment of the device is carried out using the web menu, or the built-in indicator of the received RSSI signal level.
When you turn on the device, we see the familiar Ubiquiti interface:

The device menu is in the process of alignment.

Functionally, the trunk operates in a transparent bridge mode, with the ability to control the device in a dedicated management vlan.

The test operation of the system was carried out by us at distances of 2.8, 4.5, and 5.6 km.
Distances were chosen to maximize system performance.
Before testing, the calculation of the energy of the radio channel was made to determine the expected signal level and achievable speed.
The system was installed on the roofs, on a standard pipe stand.
The fasteners and adjustment of the system are very convenient, in the attached video you can see that the system is adjusted by rotating only 2 screws.

Appearance of the device.


Calculation of the radio channel - simple and convenient planning of the radio network


Pipe stand device

Test results

When testing on the 4.5 km channel, the load consisted in the traffic of the house network and IPTV (the tests were carried out on the live network of the provider, connected a group of high-rise buildings).
On the remaining channels, testing was performed using a Fluke Etherscope hardware traffic generator.

• The power system of the system fully complies with the declared one; it is possible even to adjust it 4 dB better than the calculated one.
• Due to some features of software revision 1.0, we reduced the output power by 3 dBm

	Calculated values		Derived values
	Signal level (without power reduction)	Full Duplex Channel Capacity	Signal (including power reduction)	Full Duplex Channel Capacity
2.8 km	-63	743 Mbps	-59	743 Mbps
4.5 km	-67.3	500 Mbps	-66	500 Mbit
5.6 km	-68.8	500 Mbps	-67	500 Mbps

Estimated and achieved in practice signal level dBm


Estimated and practically achieved speed of the radio channel Mbps


Effective (useful) fullduplex speed typical solutions point-to-point, depending on the distance


Somewhere there, beyond the forest, almost 6 kilometers away, there will now be fast internet.

Conclusion

The system fully confirmed the stated characteristics.
The signal levels obtained during practical tests exceed the calculated ones, the system performance is as stated.
Unlike Wi-Fi solutions, the system transmits IPTV traffic without disturbing the quality of the picture, and also has no restrictions on packet load, that is, it can also work with a large amount of torrent traffic.
Unlike many relay stations, the system does not have license restrictions for bandwidth and hidden fees for their withdrawal - you acquire the system with all its capabilities at once.

In new versions of software, the manufacturer promises to please us with additional functionality, for example:
• MTU support up to 9 KB, which allows operators to transmit MPLS traffic without additional fragmentation
• Increasing the distance at which the system operates at maximum speed
• Improved stability of links longer than 10-12 km in the rain due to new noise-resistant modulations.
• SNMP support for removing statistics from devices

In the near future, we plan to conduct another test series and test the new version of the software (at the time of publication, it has already been released), and the next batch of AirFiber will arrive by mid-November.

Now ask questions!