Microwave vs Fiber

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Furbz

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Hi All,

i have a 10mbps Microwave based link at my business

a good deal on Fibre is now finally available that has me tempted

the Month to Month costs are pretty much the same.
R1799pm ex vat for microwave vs R1820pm ex vat for fibre (both 10mbps)

the fibre i would have to pay R5000 install costs - through metrofibre
and on top of that i need to purchase a router.

is Fiber any better than Microwave?

or is it much of a muchness?

Thanks in advance!
 
Upload speeds are much better and latency is rock solid on fiber.
 
If your microwave link is stable, with no packet loss, and has low latency then you won't notice any difference moving to fiber.

Obviously if there is different contention ratio on the services then there will be a difference.
 
There is inevitably a higher latency on wireless connections, versus wired. Fiber will have a better upload speed as well as (potentially) higher bandwidth if you wanted a faster line.

That said, if you're looking at ~R7000 to swap over, then you need to decide what it's worth to you. Do you game? Is latency a factor for you? If it's for general business uses . streaming etc then it's probably not worth the outlay.
 
A fixed line always beats a wireless connection. I still believe in that!
 
I'd say leave it as is unless there is something wrong with the existing solution.

No point in paying 5k to fix something that isn't broken
 
Seems fine to me. I guess it depends on data usage, and how much data you get. But if the microwave is doing it for you, keep it for now
 
Thanks all,

yeah i think the R7k odd is the deal breaker.
this is for a small business

the current supplier we have not had the worlds best service from.
but once we finally fixed certain issues it seems ok. just need to be patient.

there are just times when the speed seems to crawl.
and that is with a 1:10 contention ratio

no SLA in place though.
the fiber would have a SLA at least
 
Furbz said:
Thanks all,

yeah i think the R7k odd is the deal breaker.
this is for a small business

the current supplier we have not had the worlds best service from.
but once we finally fixed certain issues it seems ok. just need to be patient.

there are just times when the speed seems to crawl.
and that is with a 1:10 contention ratio

no SLA in place though.
the fiber would have a SLA at least
Click to expand...

If its causing downtime, or decrease in work activity, it might be a no-brainer to move over fibre
 
At R1700, I doubt you have microwave. Microwave antenna/radio's cost about R40k a side.

You probably have "fixed wireless" based on 5Ghz Ubiquiti or Mikrotik radios.

Proper Microwave (17Ghz or higher) is a match for fibre up to speeds of about 500Mbit.

If your fixed wireless is slow, its usually not the fact that its wireless, its the ISP not supplying sufficient bandwidth. Some Cheaper fibre connection have exactly the same problem. Alternatively, it could be that there is interference with the wireless signal between you and the tower.

The way to know for sure is to measure your packet loss. low bandwidth with less that 1% packet loss, means the ISP does not have enough bandwidth. If packet loss is over 2%, than there is probably interference and the ISP will need to change channels on the wireless gear.

I use this tool to measure packet loss: www.pingplotter.com
 
If it's microwave then you will not notice anything, if it's normal wireless you have then your ping times will improve, that's about it
 
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