 Good morning, and thank you for joining our webinar today. Happy Valentine's Day to everybody. My name is Tossos with RF Elements, and today we'll be talking about migrating to Horns, how we go from the sector technology that you're running today and successfully migrate to using horn antennas on your network. So here we go. Migrating to Horns 101, our most recent and newest webinar that we offer. So some of the problems when migrating to horns that people run through is, one of the first things is people just not sure where to start. Perhaps you've already tested our technology, you've tested our antennas, you've used them, but you're not quite sure how to start migrating horns throughout your network and what are some of the best methods for doing that. So we'll be discussing this topic today. Maybe you're unclear of the migration path, right? Again, you really know that you want to go to horns and you're just unsure how to migrate from tower to tower, where to use them, where not to use them, or when you should use them. Possibly you're here because you have problems because you've tested our horns and your initial tests are a little fuzzy. Maybe you don't really understand the results. This is something that's common, where people try and replace a traditional 90 degree sector with a 90 degree horn, not understanding the gain difference there and assuming that you'll get much greater distances than you can. So therefore, again, you're just unsure of how this technology works. Or maybe you've never heard of horns before until recently and you're just totally lost and you don't know where to start, what you're doing and hopefully as we go through this webinar, we'll help answer some of those questions that you may have. So how do you efficiently migrate to this new technology? So we'll be going through some best known customer practices. We've had horn antennas on the market now for over three years. They've been making a dramatic change to what Wisps can do now with their wireless networks. And we have lots and lots of data points and a huge user base out there. So we'll be going through some of the best known methods that and practices that they have used and quite possibly this might be something that you can use yourself and help you migrate to horns. Another thing to efficiently migrate to this new technology, you need to solve the problem you're actually having. So you need to understand where your problems are and use horns to solve those problems. Don't just go all out for no reason. So horns allow you to grow your network and build out and fix these problems as they occur as you slowly migrate and transition into horn technology. Another thing that you need to understand to efficiently migrate is you need to understand the spectral limits of your area. No two deployments are the same. Antennas that, a deployment that might work for one Wisp may not work for another. So you have to understand the spectral limits of your area, what frequencies you have, what you can reuse, how you can reuse them and how to efficiently use horn antennas within the spectral limits. The next point is kind of hand in hand. Use your available spectrum wisely. So horn antennas really give you way more spectrum to use than traditional sectors. But just because that's so, you should still use it wisely. Spectrum is a very limited source that you have. It's finite, it's not unlimited. So you should go ahead and use it wisely. Just because you have a radio that can run 100 megahertz channel, don't throw up all your horns on 100 meg channels if you really don't need that capacity, right? So save that so that way you can grow and slowly build out and offer services as you need them and as you need to grow. So don't just go and waste it. Use your spectrum wisely, it's very important. So the breakdown of this webinar will be, again, a couple of methods. The first method is augmented coverage. This is a hybrid deployment of traditional sector antennas in conjunction with horn antennas. This is the number one method and how most people start and how they build out their networks by utilizing the unique properties of our symmetrical horn antennas with our twist port technology with their traditional sector deployments. The second method is pretty much kind of a no-brainer, right? So the method too is just building out all new towers based on all horns and no traditional sectors. And then we'll go to the conclusion as we wrap it up and go into the Q&A section of this webinar. So before we start on these methods, a few key points here, right? So when you're migrating to horns, a total overall network forklift is not needed to start, right? So again, horns give you the ability to slowly migrate. You don't have to take down your whole tower and have long-term outages while you're mounting new horn antennas and trying to migrate from one technology to another. So if we look at kind of the current network and how most wisps networks look, you have, again, this kind of standard geometry of a 3120s or 490-degree sectors, and you wanna build out from there. So horn antennas give you the ability to slowly bring up horn antennas, migrate your customers onto those APs, and then decommission your traditional sector. So it really gives you the ability to not have much downtime in your network when you migrate. So you don't have to just kill the whole network and put up horns and turn one thing off and turn the other thing on and cause issues for your customers. Another big thing to know and something to pay attention to is knowing where your customers really are. Traditional sectors have very large and complex side lobes, front lobes, above and below the main beam. And it's very, very common to have customers that you insist are connected in front of the sector and they're truly not, right? And you need to know where your customers are because it can cause a big problem. Or again, as we spoke about earlier, some fuzzy results when you migrate to horns where you might have an issue. So in this thing here, we see customers that are connected to the back of the sector. When you throw your horn up and you start migrating these customers off onto the horn, you're now gonna have customers that have no signal, right? So you're gonna scramble and be worried, oh no, what do I do? And you bring your other sector back up and then you kind of maybe potentially move away from this technology. So the best thing to do is to know where your customers are before you migrate, if you have customers on extreme side lobes or the back of your sector, make sure you move them to the proper sector that's facing them before you transition your customers off your traditional sector and onto your horns because the horns will definitely let you know where your customers are and where they are not because they're very precise. Using the right antenna for the job, right? This is another thing with horn antennas and something that we bring to the market, right? So if you have customers that are close into the tower or they're not sporadically laid out in your coverage area, don't use a sector that has too high a gain, it's not necessary. Even when you utilize down tilt on traditional sectors, they have very large and very powerful upper and lower beams that still hear noise from distance and also transmit into further distances than you need, right? So a lower gain horn could be the answer for you, right? So use the right antenna for the job. It's the reason why we offer seven different horn antennas, everything from 30 degrees at the narrowest up to 90 degrees for the point-to-multipoint product line. So use the right antenna for the job, take a little bit of time to plan out your deployment and your migration will go much smoother and your customers and your customer support tax will be a lot happier. The second part is also using them correctly and using down tilt, right? So perhaps you have customers at distance and you have customers that are close into the tower with traditional sectors, you have to utilize down tilt on one and then more flat on the second one to cover everybody. Not only does this create problems because you have intermixing beams or overlapping coverage, but again, it creates a lot more interference issues with you. Again, horns are extremely unique because their beams are very precise. You can use different down tilts for different sectors to cover the same area. So if you look at the animation of the picture on the right-hand side, you can see for the closer-ring customers on the left-most horn, you could use a lot more down tilt to again hear less noise at distance. Where in the middle you might have customers that go further out, you can tilt it up a little bit more in order to make sure that they're within the beam coverage and then again on the right. So it gives you much more granularity of how you paint your RF signature out on your coverage area where you don't get that with traditional sectors. One of the last key points here is, a balanced network is a happy network. So with traditional sectors, you have a very wide variety of MCS rates throughout your customers. If they're in a sweet spot, they get high MCS rates down the center as they go towards the edge of the sector, MCS rates start to drop a little bit. So this increases your CPU load and also decreases your network throughput. This is one of the biggest issues with mixed modulation rate customers within a traditional sector. It is a sector with MCS rates that very greatly really tax your CPU because it has to constantly change modulation rates for every customer and really bring down the overall performance of that AP where if you use a horn antenna, you may get customers that have a potentially lower MCS rate, but the variance of MCS rates across those customers is much more uniform. So you would have a much happier AP and a much happier customer base if all your customers had MCS seven rates, for example, whether radio is not overworking to change modulation rates and give you overall better throughput and user experience than the customers that have MCS nine and have the fastest rates, but the radio has to tune down to service those MCS six or MCS four customers as well. So the overall throughput of an AP that has a lower but more stable MCS rate or a more uniform with less variation MCS rate then a sector with a wide variety MCS rates will have a much better user experience and much better throughput overall. So you should really take this into consideration. A balanced network is a happy network. And then the final point is really understand your technology horn antennas are still greatly misunderstood. And a lot of talk out there goes to the very large or vertical beam thinking that we're wasting a lot of energy and we're setting it up into the air or we're hearing a lot more. If you understand the technology better and you look at how it truly works, you'll understand that as you employ tilt into your or down tilt into your sector, the gain at the horizon drops off just as dramatically as it does to the sides of the sector because it's symmetrical. So employing some down tilt can greatly reduce your at the horizon signal and it falls off really fast. As you can see 18 dB here, right? Even with a little up tilt as you start down tilting, you can see that you can have as low as potentially six dB of antenna gain at the horizon. So that hears way less noise than your traditional sector. And at times that gain is much lower than those upper lobes and lower lobes are on traditional sectors. So again, understand how the technology works will allow you to become much more successful in your deployments as you migrate to horns from traditional sectors. So the first method we talked about earlier is augmenting coverage. This is the hybrid sector horn type deployment. So there's quite a few reasons why this may be the initial path for you. So perhaps you have oversubscribed APs and you just need to offload some of those customers from one AP to another or you're simply trying to just add capacity to your towers. Horn antennas are fantastic for this. Again, maybe your customers are all close in, right? So using a really too high gain of a traditional sector for a coverage area that doesn't exceed just a couple of miles doesn't make sense. So a smaller, wider, lower gain horn might be great for that particular deployment. Maybe you wanna use larger, narrower horns for high density deployments, right? Maybe you really have really high customer density so you need the horns because there's no other way whether it's space restrictions or weight restrictions or wind restrictions on your tower. Horn antennas make it fantastic with a very small footprint to be able to build out high density deployments. Maybe you want to add higher throughput packages. Again, horns are great for that. You can have your traditional sectors for your run-of-the-mill, standard internet connectivity or packages to your customers but you can have specialized high throughput packages with horns that you can charge a premium for. Or maybe you have problems with your performance in between your traditional sector. So using horns in between these sectors to improve the edges sector performance is again, another reason why people use horn antennas in this augmented coverage pattern. One of the worst areas of the traditional sector is the edge of that traditional sector. That's where you get the largest imbalance of gain performance. You get the largest chain-to-chain performance as the vertical and horizontal beams go kind of out of whack at the edge of the sector. This is where horn antennas can really help bring those customers in to bring them more up the par to what they're expecting and closer to what you're offering. So if we're offloading or adding capacity, again, we can look at kind of this cookie cutter traditional 490 degree sectors here where you have a couple of sectors that have that are just quite frankly overloaded. So the overall throughput of that AP is really poor. So one of the ways in which you can help offload or add capacity is to potentially bring up two narrower horn antennas and migrate those customers onto the horn. You now help improve the performance of that older, that other sector or that other AP in the traditional sector now has less load, their performance goes up, the customers on the horn get better service. So the overall area that you're covering there in the hybrid coverage model of traditional sectors and horns can greatly improve by augmenting your coverage this way. Utilizing smaller, wider horns for close in customers. Again, perhaps you have a cluster of customers right in town that are close to the tower and then you have the rest of your customers are dispersed miles away further out from the city core. This kind of runs into this mixed MCS rates. The customers that are close into the tower or in the sweet spot will get good coverage. The ones that are really close to the tower will be on side lobes or bottom lobes and therefore have a poor connection. And the ones at distance again, your AP is working really hard to try and satisfy all this shifting in MCS rates. So you will have an average or poor overall throughput. So you can use lower gain horns that are wider to bring those customers that are close into the tower in onto a horn and get them more solid and balanced MCS rates. And therefore the customers that are at the distance will be again at a more balanced lower MCS rate but the overall performance will be more uniform and therefore better. So this is again another method that you can use in your first steps to migrate the horns from traditional sectors in this hybrid augmented coverage. You can also use larger narrower beam horns for higher density. So perhaps again, you have a large cluster of customers in one section of your coverage area. Horn antennas are great for trying to bring some balance back into your network. So you can kind of spot beam is a term people use often to bring up maybe a 30 degree horn to put just those customers on there. And again, you bring the AP capacity back up on the traditional sector because it has less customers to deal with and therefore you have a more balanced network. So dense neighborhoods can be used or narrow horns can be used to bring in dense customers or clusters of customers onto one AP to help offload the traditional sector AP. Another method is offering higher throughput packages with horns, right? So perhaps you're covering an area and in the downtown area or some part you have a cluster of businesses, right? So you may have a sector you might be selling standard two or five meg packages, right? But you have demand for businesses that are in a specific area that require a much higher throughput packages or more better SLAs for their network, right? So just like the neighborhood, you could also spot beam these particular customers with narrow horns and offer them different packages. Again, in a AP that's less overloaded with much more solid MCS rates and therefore you'll be able to offer higher throughput packages, more stable packages to specific customers and you can leave your traditional sector the way it is on lower bandwidth packages if that's what you choose. So another option for migrating to horns and something that you might consider doing with your deployments. Improving edge of sector performance. This one is great. So as you spoke about earlier as you get to the edge of a traditional sector this is where you would start to see performance differences because performance drops off at the edge that's where the gain drops off the most that's where the chain mismatches happen the most. So your customers that are at the edge of the sector usually have the worst performance compared to the rest of them. So horn antennas are great for kind of filling in that void and filling in that null zone. So you can go ahead and throw up horn antennas to bring those customers into happy MCS rates where therefore leaving the customers that are in kind of the sweeter spot of your traditional sector to have better performance and therefore that's again another option in migrating and how you move through this kind of path of migrating to horns. The important thing here is to remember that sectors are not the end game. You don't have enough channels. So people speak often about I don't want to go to horns because I just don't have channels. We don't have the spectrum for six 60 degree sectors or 12 30 degree sectors. And the reason that's the case and you are absolutely right when you say that it's because you still have traditional sectors on your network. When you migrate to horns, it opens up a whole new world to you. When we first started doing this, I remember our first like three sector deployment where people clustered three 30 degree horns for a 90 degree, right? And that was like, wow, that's fantastic. And then we went to six and somebody doing 12 horns and now we're up to 24 horns on a tower, right? When you migrate to horns and you have nothing but horn antennas on your network, that's when you really start to see some amazing things happen. People are utilizing horn antennas with GPS synchronization and running 12 horns on only two channels, right? Using an AB, AB configuration. So as long as you have traditional sectors and horns, this hybrid model, you'll never truly utilize the full benefit of horns. You have to transition to nothing but horns to really utilize that. But in the interim, they work really well and can help you again, start to slowly move to this new technology. The second portion is kind of a no brainer. It's new towers, building them out from scratch, right? So there are different types of 360 degree coverage patterns that you can do with horns. You have uniform coverage with your standard 490, 660s, 1230s and beyond. Build custom coverage based on your customer layout with a mix of different horns. Like I had mentioned, we have many different horns, everything from 30 degrees up to 90 degrees, right? So utilize all of them to build a coverage that you need. And you could also add horns as coverage is needed, right? So you don't have to start out and deck out your whole, your whole tower with 360 degree coverage of horns. You can add horns as your coverage grows or as word of mouth grows in your coverage area grows. So with uniform coverage, again, it's quite simple, right? You know, 660 degree horns, you can use 12, 30 degree horns and build it out if you have really high density, right? So these models really work. The spectrum is truly there. You can also build out custom coverage as well, right? So again, you could utilize all the different beam patterns and beam widths that we have. So you can use a combination of various degrees of horns as well as down tilt in order to cover the area based on where your customers actually are. And then you can add horns as coverage is needed, right? So you may not need to go with ultra high density, right? So you can start with 490s as, you know, word of mouth grows and your coverage area grows and customers come online. You can then take them down for wider, take down wider sectors or horns and put up more narrow ones to build density as you need it. The good thing about the horn antennas are they're built really, really well, right? So you're able to take horns down and reuse them elsewhere. So again, you can build them out and build your coverage as you need it. So in conclusion, you know, using the correct size horn for your coverage area again is very important, right? You need to look at what your deployment is like, where, you know, things are gonna go and utilize the correct horn for that, for your deployment. You know, knowing where your customers are before you deploy is again, a very important thing to do. Using down tilt as needed to achieve your coverage goals, right? This is again, very important if you need higher gain horns just because you need a narrow beam because you have high density, use down tilt. If you're not going to cover a very long distance, use the down tilt, don't send your signal where it doesn't need to go and don't receive noise that you don't need to receive. So we give you the granularity and the ability to do all of that. Building a balanced network with horns again is really important. Having a more stable lower MCS rates across your customer base will yield much better results and a better customer experience than a mixed MCS rates where you have some customers at really high MCS nine and really low MCS six or four. So again, a balanced network is a happier network and this is something that you'll actually see when you use our horns and you'll understand that more. The hybrid antenna solution is not the best approach for your overall end game, right? Going to horns completely is where you truly start to see what horns can really do for you. The only way to really grow and expand is to use nothing but horns and take away the side lobes and the interactions that you have with your traditional sectors and horns in that hybrid model and then just take some time to plan before you deploy. So just taking a little time to look at where your customers are, figuring out what the distances are and trying to figure out which horn and tenage will use before you start this migration will go a very, very long way. Again, my name is Tossos with RF Elements. Thanks for spending Valentine's Day with us and listening to our webinar here and I hope to see you all and talk to you all soon. Thanks and have a great day.