2.4ghz vs. 5.7ghz Wireless Broadband?

As a bit of a follow-up to our previous discussion on wireless broadband options, Linxx asks: "I work for a company in Yuma, Arizona that offers Wireless Internet access. We cover a large area that extends into Southern California as well as Mexico. We currently use 2.4ghz equipment to do this. We are looking into using 5.7ghz equipment to feed our access points and the rebroadcast at at 2.4ghz. We hope to releive some interferance issues. What I want to know is if anyone has actually compared the two, and if so what kind of results were produced."

Comments

Range can be a problem

[the_greywolf]

i'm not entirely familiar with the specifics, but i know you can't get the 25-mile range out of the 5.7 GHz band like you can out of the 2.4 GHz band. the speed difference is phenomenal though - 54-75mbps as opposed to 11mbps. some hardware i saw released recently (it was posted on /., but i don't have the URL off-hand) allows for a little over 100mbps in "turbo mode".

i work at a small ISP in Idaho, where we're currently rolling out a wireless network with Lucent Orinoco and Avaya hardware, and we have a huge problem with the old trees in some of these neighborhoods. i expect this problem would be worse with the higher wireless bands. we're waiting for Wi-LAN to release their 3.5 GHz wireless hardware in the US, as we'd love to roll that out.

personally, i would suggest using 802.11b hardware and wait for the 3.5GHz hardware. but that's the opinion of a sysadmin's useless assistant. ^_^