 So let's start a webinar. Good morning, afternoon, depending wherever you're located. Thank you for joining us for this webinar today. I'm Tomajusz Wolenski and I'm a product and marketing manager at RF Elements. And today we'll talk about how to increase throughput and how to go about it. The number of people who want and need to be connected to internet is constantly growing, especially now given the spread of the virus around the world. The average speed of internet connection requirements per user is actually also steadily growing at the same time. So adding these two developments together, you get an exponential growth of the demand for the throughput. And this is exactly the kind of challenge the WISPs are perfectly suited to solve. The number one challenge the WISPs are facing is that of the RF noise in the unlicensed spectrum. And WISPs commonly see the spectrographs with high to very high noise floor that prevents the wireless networks from optimal functioning all the way to the point of almost giving up on the unlicensed spectrum and actually even the WISP business is such altogether. The main issue here are the antenna side loops, which are almost never mentioned when talking about antennas. High gain, check, beam width, check, maybe front to back ratio, but not the side loops, which are the main cause of the problems with noise in unlicensed WISP networks. WISPs often try to mitigate the noise using various shields, either off the market or provided directly by the antenna manufacturer. If you must use an addition of shielding for an antenna to work properly, you should probably look for a different antenna. And the reality of these kits is that while they might help improve front to back ratio a little bit, it is practically useless anyways. Front to back ratio is a useless parameter in terms of the noise rejection in the unlicensed bands and the side loops are not affected by the shields. All that the shield does is that it rearranges the side loops, so they point in different directions than without the shield, but the shield has nothing to suppress the side loops at all. Over the years, the radio vendors have been trying to improve the situation with noise by introducing various techniques into their radios, such as GPS synchronization, which ensures that the access points within your network transmit and receive at the same time to prevent self-interference or active filtering, for example, which ensures your radio does not see out-of-channel signals. And these improvements are effective to a degree, but they're also rather costly and do not deal with the root cause of the problems with interference. But with its consequences, which is a wrong approach to begin with. So the approach to increasing the network throughput we at RF Elements think makes the most sense is to start with mitigating the noise. Our solution is different. We deal directly with the source of the noise, not its symptoms. It's like taking vitamins rather than getting rid of the flu while on the sick leave. We all understand that prevention is much better than the cure. And RF Elements technology is the prevention for unlicensed with networks. It provides efficient noise rejection and mitigation of the loss in the radio system itself, so you don't have to deal with the headache of the noise to begin with. This is achieved through the horn antennas and twist port connector. The horn sectors effectively deal with the noise due to their zero-side lobes radiation pattern. And twist port interface introduces virtually zero loss to the signal delivery from the radio to the antenna, thanks to removed coaxial cables and connectors. The core issue of traditional patch ray sectors and their frequency-dependent side lobes. So these side lobes are there because of the physics of antenna arrays and patch rays themselves. There are an inherent property of the patch rays as a type of an antenna. And the price tag these antennas are sold with, you know, there is no simple way around it. The side lobes decrease SNR the radio is working with or signal-to-noise ratio, which in the end decreases the overall throughput. Our horn antennas on the other hand do not have any side lobes. All they have is a single main lobe that covers the area you need without generating or receiving any noise through the side lobes, which effectively isolates your network from the surrounding noise. And this is the essence of dealing with noise and unlicense to its networks, getting rid of the side lobes. These antennas are often used for point-to-point links, and they also have significant side lobes, thanks to which they cover vast areas beyond the main lobe, which is simply not desired. This also makes them receptive to the noise in these areas through those side lobes. And the result of that is a poor network throughput. This is the radiation pattern of our ultra horn, a high gain and narrow beamwidth horn antenna. As with all our horns, all it has is one main lobe and nothing else, suppressed noise and maximized throughput. That's really what horns and the zero side lobe radiation pattern enables. So far I talked about the antennas as having a lot of side lobes or having no side lobes, which is rather vague when speaking about noise rejection. As engineers and business owners, we or you like numbers. So is there an antenna parameter describing the side lobe performance in a numerical way? Indeed, yes, it's beam efficiency. So beam efficiency is an antenna parameter that quantifies the side lobes. It is the ratio of the energy contained in the main lobe to the total energy an antenna radiates. So maximum beam efficiency you can achieve is 100%, in which case the antenna has zero side lobes because 100% of the energy it radiates is in the main lobe. The closer to zero the beam efficiency is, the more side lobes an antenna has, meaning more problems for your networks because of receiving and transmitting the unnecessary noise. To give you a practical example, here you see the radiation pattern of a generic parabolic dish antenna. Its beam efficiency is 40%. This means that those 40% of the power this antenna radiates goes into the main lobe. So how about the remaining 60%? The remaining energy goes everywhere else and since everything outside the main lobe is a side lobe, it goes into the side lobes. And note that all the side lobes are highlighted. So beam efficiency includes all the side lobes of an antenna, unlike front to back ratio or any other side lobe metric you may or may not know. With beam efficiency the comparison of antennas in terms of side lobe performance becomes extremely simple. The higher number wins. That's it. So ultra horn on the left side has beam efficiency 99%. So only 1% of the power it radiates is in the side lobes. A generic dish on the other hand on the right side has beam efficiency of 40%. So the remaining 60% of the energy it radiates is in the side lobes. 99% is clearly more than 40%. So therefore ultra horn is better antenna in terms of noise suppression. Probably the best on the market, to be honest. The vast majority of antennas used for sectorial coverage in WIST networks are either patch arrays or horns. And the patch arrays have many frequency dependent side lobes. So their beam efficiency values are somewhere around 60%, depending on the manufacturing and design quality. The RF elements horns, both symmetrical and asymmetrical, have beam efficiency of somewhere between 90 and 95%. You can see other horns in this graph as well. So this is to highlight that it actually takes considerable effort to design a horn antenna such that its beam efficiency is high. So the stable and zero side lobe radiation pattern is not a given as soon as you use a horn. But we put a lot of effort into our antennas. So we achieve the beam efficiencies of at least 90%. Similarly with point-to-point antennas. The patch arrays are again at the bottom of the beam efficiency performance because of the many frequency dependent side lobes that collect and transmit the noise hurting any and every WIST networks, really. Dishes are somewhat better. And generally the bigger the dish, the better the beam efficiency becomes. That is if the antenna is carefully designed and well manufactured. What is interesting here though is the ultra horn. Its beam efficiency is 99%. So over the whole bandwidth of operation and both polarizations, the beam efficiency of ultra horn is practically perfect. Only 1% of the signal it radiates is going into the side lobes. So if you would ever wonder if the ultra horn is worth the extra cash compared to a dish, you have a very clear answer here. With 99% beam efficiency, it's probably the best performing antenna on the market in terms of noise suppression. And if you want to learn more about beam efficiency, we have a whole webinar on this topic which we did already in the past. Recorded it and now you can find it on our YouTube channel. Second part into the puzzle of increasing the throughput is to actually deliver maximum power from the radio to the antenna through our near-zero loss feeding system. So by removing the coaxial cables and connectors, while at the same time integrating the transition from the radio to an antenna directly into the PCB of the radio, you achieve near-zero loss system when delivering the signal to the antenna. So this is exactly what twist port does. Since the quality of the coaxial cables varies widely, it can easily happen that you save half of the power of the signal by using the twist port, which helps you reach those distant customers just like the various coverage planning tools predict. The quality of the antenna performance at both polarizations is also part of the overall throughput performance. The traditional sector coverage is different when switching between the polarizations, which causes problems for the customers at the edges of the sector. On top of that, because of the shape of the radiation pattern, the further away the customers are from the bore site from the center of the sector, the worse their experience is. Horn antennas, on the other hand, offer uniform coverage in the whole sector and the same coverage area for both polarizations. So eventually, every customer inside the sector experiences the same high-quality and stable service. Anytime you deploy a horn, you know how your total throughput increases. You can rely on the performance it provides. The trade-off between antenna gain and the signal-to-noise ratio is an important one to understand, especially for those who worry about the lower gain of horns compared to the traditional sectors. With patch array antenna sectors that are most common in the Wisp industry, higher gain inevitably means stronger side lows. Because of the ever-present noise, the improvement of the signal level is diminished by the higher side lows that collect the noise, which often leaves the Wisp surprised when replacing a sector with one with even higher gain. And this is because of the physics of these antennas. Growing gain equals growing side lows. If, on the other hand, we could have a higher gain antenna or higher gain of the main lobe without the side lows, we would achieve what we would hope for, what we actually hope for when using higher gain antenna. This is unfortunately not possible with the patch arrays. With horns, you can easily see a huge throughput increase despite their smaller gain compared to old sector day-replace. So how is that possible? When a link at unlicensed 5GHz twist network is troubled by a strong background noise, it's because of the side lows of the antenna used. So the traditional patch array sector has many side lows. If that antenna has no side lows, which is the case of our horns, it doesn't collect the noise which decreases the noise floor the radio is working with. The radio cares about the signal-to-noise ratio more than the signal strength alone, which is why an antenna with lower gain can provide better performance. The lacoside lobes lowers the noise floor, resulting into higher SNR, which results into better MCS rates and eventually increased throughput at the user end and overall throughput of the network. So it's really the trade-off. The suppression of the noise is that outperforms the lost gain compared when you're switching from the traditional sector antenna to horns. So let's look at a few scenarios on how to use this knowledge. We just acquired how to use the horns in the practical life. With the traditional sectors, your network throughput is very sensitive to its surroundings. So whether you or your competitors add new sectors, your network always sees it through the silos as decreased and unstable throughput. The horn antennas, on the other hand, only cover and receive the signal from where they're supposed to and nowhere else. Because of that, the sector is stable and performs at the limit of the radio possibilities. When increasing the number of subscribers in a sector covered by a traditional patch array, you experience a gradual decline of the throughput with every additional subscription. Because the sector is wide and the antenna has strong side loops, the collocation of multiple sectors is very difficult. With horn antennas, you can divide the sectors into smaller or wider portions. And because of the lack of the side loops, each of the collocated sectors performs with zero self-interference. Superb stability and throughput which results into a happy customer base and headache-free network for you as a business owner. To sum it up, dividing a wide and very sensitive sector into more compact units using horn antennas with no side loops, you can collocate as many sectors as you wish, while at the same time, you can be sure that each of these sectors works at its best, leveraging the maximum throughput the radios allow. Eventually, once you switch to the horns, you'll hit another performance bottleneck and that's the one of the maximum throughput your radios allow. But this is easy to deal with. You can put another sector up and since the horns collocate with extreme ease, it's very easy to do. The patcheress sectors with their large side loops always see the closely located sectors resulting into you not being able to use the neighboring channels. Now, due to the lack of the side loops, horns do not see the neighboring sectors which gives you the ability to fully use these previously noisy and unstable channels. Even in the case when the neighboring sectors point away from yours, the side loops are strong enough to increase the noise floor such that the radio is working with resulting into lower throughputs you can achieve and horns can help you here as well. Not seeing the neighboring sectors, the noise floor is pushed down, the signal to noise ratio improves and you can leverage those higher modulation rates up to what the radios are capable of. With the traditional sectors, you don't have a lot of options in terms of the bandwidth and the range of gains and the presence of the side loops makes addition of every new sector a cringing experience because the overall throughput of your network will decrease and eventually completely freeze as you keep adding the sectors but the superb collocation and lack of side loops of horns makes the growth of your network easy and pain-free. You can grow the size of your network virtually, indefinitely. This is the core of the idea of scalability and the ability to grow your network throughput. To be able to grow your network without hurting the existing sectors which is exactly what horns enable you to do. And if you wonder how densely can the horns be installed and still deliver on their promise, you can see a clear answer here. It's many. Lots of sectors coexisting on one tower and with excellent and stable performance at the same time. Unbelievable, isn't it? With horns, daily reality. And mind you, these are pictures from our customers, not our own. So the fire of elements technology is the winning formula for unlicensed Wisp networks. The lack of side loops of horn antennas ensures superb noise immunity. The lack of coaxial cables and interconnects ensures delivery of maximum power to the antenna and the tool set of 11 different horns with various bandwidths and gains enable incredible scalability. So you can focus on the growth of your company. All these benefits come at no added cost. You can easily do without the GPS sync if the antennas do not see each other like horns. And due to the noise suppression, you do not need to use wide channels or spend additional money on non-effective fixes. Horns are a complete solution in and of itself. And I know that this might sound rather unbelievable if you're attending first of our webinar for the very first time. Which is why I would like to encourage you to check our testimonials whether on our YouTube channel or in the Wisp discussion groups such as WispTalk on Facebook or similar ones. Just search for RF elements or hashtag RF elements in those groups and you can see for yourself what your colleagues say about our antennas. Sometimes our customers wonder where to buy our products. So if you go to our webpage and directly from the landing page you click on the stock locator. There you can select the product you're looking for and your region and you will see a list of distributors in your area as a result of this filtration. I would also like to invite you to join rfelab.com It's our discussion forum where you can ask any and every question about our products and get in touch with us. We also announce webinars such as this one on the forum or you can search through the questions which our customers have already asked. Another good resource to check is our Wisp Traveler playlist on our YouTube channel. These are short videos where our customers Wisp like you are sharing their experience with Horns. You can see we have customers from many parts of the world. So we really have a wide range and spectrum of customers and eventually the use cases where the horns perform well. Another playlist we have on YouTube is called Inside Wireless and this is a series of short educational videos on all things RF. So whether you're just a startup or a veteran Wisp I encourage you to check this channel. Those are really short 2-3 minute snippets of knowledge from the world of RF engineering. So whether you just need to refresh or clarify something it's definitely a very good resource. And finally I would like to bring your attention to this gentleman right here. Mero Sloviak is our area sales manager for UK and Ireland. So if you have any questions if you need technical support Mero is a Wisp himself at the same time so he definitely sees both sides and that really gives his advice an added value and weight. So if you need any support about our products you can of course always contact us directly or if you want a more localized support this is your man. So thank you for attending and have a nice rest of your day. Bye bye.