 So, how do we migrate to horns? That's the topic of this webinar. I'm Domar Zawolenski. I'm a product manager with RF Elements. And I would like to welcome you. And thank you for finding the time, especially as the previous WISPA webinar just ended. So we appreciate your attendance and let's go directly to the topic. So first, everyone should ask themselves a question before migrating to horns. And the question is, why should I migrate to horns in the first place? And there are several symptoms in WISPA networks that indicate that the migration to another technology, in this case, we'll of course talk about horns, might be a good idea. And these are high noise background, unstable network throughput or jumping modulation rates, latency issues or even way too many customer complaints. And all these together might have a even more subtle result, which is your inability to grow your WISPA business. And there are several issues you might run into if you're interested in migrating to horns. There is no general instruction on where to start or maybe the execution path is not clearly outlined or maybe you've already deployed some of the horns and you're not quite sure about the results you're seeing and what they actually mean. Or you might be confused on what to do with horns to begin with. And that is okay, it is completely okay as well. So regardless which one is your case, this webinar will address all these points. Two distinct paths are possible when migrating to horns. So first is augmenting the coverage, meaning that you change only part of the network, just some of the sectors you already have to sort of ease into using horns and not switch everything at once, kind of jumping head first because obviously that may be quite dangerous and uncertain. Second way to migrate to horns is when you're building a completely new tower. So both cases have their specifics to be aware of and we'll go through these in this webinar further on. But before we go to the migration breakdown itself and there are several things that you would ideally know before even starting with it. So our horns are in the market since 2014 and our customers have accumulated a wealth of knowledge on how to use horns and you can actually should lean on this experience. You can find about these best practices from fellow Wisps either personally or on various forums on social media channels. So second, only solve the problems you really have. Take the time to figure out what is the issue you're facing and you're pretty much halfway through with solving it. Spectrum is one of the most valuable resources Wisps have, especially those using the unlicensed frequency bands, but it's the same for the licensed bands. It's the noise saturation is just happening slower but nevertheless, it's definitely sure to happen as well. So it's important to understand how spectrum is utilized in your area and therefore limited at the same time. So adjust the network planning on that base. And also despite that spectrum might be clean really only use as much as you need to deliver the services you're selling. In short, use the spectrum wisely and eventually also understand the limits of the hardware you're using. So you're not disappointed when upgrading to horns. So you don't need to change all the sectors on a tower to successfully test if horns will work for you or not. It's not necessary to take all the old patch erase sectors down to see if you can improve your network with horns. You can start small. For example, by selecting the worst performing sector then change for horns just that one. Now this way you do not need to commit a major investment but test the water first with minimum risk involved. Because horns are very different from the traditional patch erase sectors you need to know where your customers are located. While with the traditional sectors you may have been able to connect the customers even in very unexpected places. And like you can see from this image like behind the sector itself this might not be and most likely will not be the case with horns. Because horns don't have any side loops or back loop as the traditional sectors do you might end up not being able to connect some of the customers that might be connected with the traditional sector. Which is a good thing to keep in mind while planning the migration. Also understand the hardware you're using. So while horns can bring huge improvement to Wisp network and your business bottom line their resulting throughput is still decided by the limits of the radios that process the data flowing through them. So the total throughput is ultimately limited by what the radios can do. So if you deal with the noise if you clear out the ether you remove one source of problems. But then the bottleneck of the maximum throughput of each radio is limiting the maximum total throughput you can see your network working with. The options of gain selection with traditional patch erase sectors are quite limited. And this leads to users developing the habits of using antennas which too much gain in situations when smaller gain antenna would be more than enough like in this comparison to cover the customers displayed you do not need high gain. And not only that the smaller access point gain will improve the noise floor the access point radio sees and works with and thanks to, and that's thanks to the smaller gain the access point antenna has and through which it will receive less noise avoiding the distance sources of noise. With traditional sectors using the down tilt to cover the high density areas near the tower is difficult. And that's because of the narrow beam within the elevation plane of these antennas. Moreover, the down tilt is usable on the up to two or three degrees since these antennas are extremely sensitive to the down tilt. So anything beyond a few degrees of the down tilt makes the coverage pretty much advantage to nonexistence. With Hornstow, thanks to the symmetrical radiation pattern the coverage near the towers is as easy as the plus minus 25 degree down tilt helps you to optimize the coverage depending on the user base you're trying to serve and further improve the noise floor the radio is working with because the down tilt not only shrinks the coverage but also the antenna to receive the less noise from distant noise sources. So how to figure out the down tilt you should be using with horns. Our link calculator provides very precise and clear answer. So using the point to multiple calculator on our web page you see how the coverage changes with increasing down tilt so you can easily optimize the coverage. The calculator uses real map data and the radiation pattern data as well. So it's really the closest thing to reality out there. And finally, it's really the best tool to avoid having to just guess or eyeball what the down tilt should be when using horns. So instead of using just one patch erase sector or one type of patch erase sector with fixed beam width regardless of the customer base position horns let you cover the customers optimally depending on the customer density and positioning. You can select the horns with corresponding beam width and really not waste any of the signal that you're transmitting or receiving. With the seven different symmetrical three asymmetrical horns and ultra horn you have plenty of options to plan your network coverage in a highly granular way and keep adjusting it depending on how your customer base expands or shrinks. The wide beam width angles of patch erase sectors often seduce wisps to connect as many customers as possible. While this sounds attractive because you naturally save the cash for the extra gear it is harmful to your customers and their experience of your service. So many CP is connected to one access point makes the CPU of the access point radio work real hard when using patch erase sectors that have very frequency dependent coverage. So the differences of the modulation rates between the CP is connected to that one AP puts a heavy load on the radio CPU and thus slows the whole network down significantly. The uniform coverage of horns makes all the difference here. So despite you might not achieve the highest MCS rates in the whole sector, horns ensure stable and high MCS rates in the whole coverage area. So because of uniform MCS rates across all the CPEs the CPU of the radio is not overloaded. And this results into outstanding customer experience because their connection will be reliable and with the throughput they're actually paying for. Our customers sometimes are confused about the symmetrical radiation pattern of horns. So the elevation narrow main beam of the traditional sectors is more a disadvantage really because the coverage is extremely sensitive to the right tilt setting. With horns you do not need to worry about this. You can use symmetrical horns in any landscape scenario. High customer density or deep valleys regardless symmetrical horns will deliver. The asymmetrical horns on the other hand have a narrower elevation beam with compared to the azimuth beam with. So the asymmetrical results into higher gain so you can cover further areas, further distant areas and potentially more customers but also makes them less suitable for maintenance regions where they might not cover the valley as well. So asymmetrical radiation pattern is good for lower density and higher distances which are common in for example rural or suburban areas. How do you then go about augmenting your existing network? Let's have a detailed look at this. Naturally you might want to start testing horns by offloading your heavily loaded access points or extending the capacity of these towers. Once you decided which ones those are it is smart to consider which horns might do the best job here. Since now you have 10 different tools to choose from smaller horns for closer distances for closer clients larger horns for higher customer density and distance. If you want to have the option to offer for example higher packages to premium customers horns enable this kind of augment as well or maybe you want to improve the network performance at the edge of the sectors because of the customer complaints about unstable connection. All these scenarios are perfect use cases for horns. So offloading the capacity or adding the capacity here you can see how traditional setup might look like. You have four sectors which are well not they don't even need to overlap but because of the self interference you see let's say poor performance through the whole site. Some sectors have average throughput some have really poor and so on. So what can you do here? You might want to offload some of those really poorly performing sectors. And do you do that by putting up let's say a pair of horns as illustrated in this animation. So as soon as you put bunch of those customers on the horns that will of course make it easy for those poor performing sectors with the patchery antennas and overall improve the performance of the whole network. In terms of the width of the sector some of the clients especially considering this example especially the closing clients might be having a average throughput but as visible from the image they're clustered closely together. So maybe we could do something here and indeed if we take one of those smaller horns with smaller gain but wider beam width and cover the customers near that tower in that dashed area the overall performance of the site can improve in this way because we simply migrated those customers nearby the tower to the horn antenna to the horn sector the originally patchery traditional sector also sees an improvement. And vice versa if there is a group of customers clustered somewhere further away from the site and the whole sector just performs on really average throughput quite unstable and you're not really quite sure what would help to improve the situation putting up a horn might be a good idea and of help here. So taking those narrower beam width horns for example at 30 degree horn it has higher gain so it easily reaches those customers further away from the site which are closely clustered together and voila everything improves. The older sector performance improves because there's less customers connected to it and at the same time the horn provides a very stable and high throughput performance to those customers they're connected to the horn in that densely populated cluster. On the other hand, for example maybe you're serving businesses and some of them can definitely afford those higher throughput packages. With the traditional sector it's kind of a guess game. You just keep adding the customers until and you see the network performance deteriorating progressively. So you really cannot, you don't have the space to offer those higher throughput packages to even if there were customers that are willing to pay you just physically cannot do it with the traditional sectors. And this is where the horns come in handy. Using again in this example the 30 degree symmetrical horn you can really spotlight those customers that are willing and capable to pay for those higher packages. The horns really enable you to leverage whatever your radios can handle. So they really give you that margin they give you that additional bandwidth to work with and be able to be more competitive. Your business ends up being more, you have an advantage over your competition by being able to offer those higher throughput packages. In situations when the customers at the edges of the sector see poor to really let's say bad performance meaning that their throughput speed is changing substantially throughout the day and or changing also with changing frequency when you see a for example cleaner bit of the spectrum and you wanna switch to that leverage that and as soon as you do so because of the frequency dependence of the performance of traditional sectors this might be just a guess game in the end. So the traditional sectors and all their frequency dependence of their parameters and coverage will simply not allow you to provide that good service to the customers at the edge of those sectors despite that you might overlap these sectors. And here horns can come to the rescue as well. Take those narrow beam width horns and just put them between the sectors aim them at those overlapping edges. Here horns again will stabilize the whole situation. Again, the customers in those traditional sectors will see an improvement because you simply offload them. You take bunch of those customers away and it's not only the throughput there that those customers are using but also as we explained before the switching between the MCS rates puts a computational load on those radios which also is mitigated when you use horns to cover the edges of the sectors. So sometimes you can see or complain that you don't have enough channels. Even though you might deploy the horns to kind of come to the rescue and improve the situation with the horns you're really addressing those problematic sectors or edges of the sectors. And as you keep adding the customers you'll see that it's still not it. It's still deteriorating as you adding those customers to those traditional sectors. And in that case, well, you can still go even further and replace those traditional sectors by horns. And this way, because horns don't have any side logs their coverage is very stable meaning with changing frequency their coverage doesn't change the maximum gain doesn't change. All of these factors added together will make up for really great and stable performance. But again, of course, up to the limit of what the radios can chew. So the radios have some maximum throughput they can work with. And of course that's the most you can see even with horns. After all, horns, what they do they simply avoid collecting the noise which the traditional sectors do. And of course the horns are also very stable with frequency. So if you building a new site you might decide, well, why don't I just build it up 100% with horns? Avoid the traditional sectors altogether avoid the hassle that comes with growing your customer base when using traditional sectors. And this you can achieve by various in various combinations. So again, there's the tool set of 10 types of horns. They are different beam widths, different gains and the ultra horn with the high gain for narrow sectors or point to point applications. But anyway, you can for example go with the uniform coverage which just means that you take for example four 90 degree horns and cover the whole circle or a six 60 degree or 12 30 degree horns. And they will all achieve the same thing. But of course with the difference that the 90 degree horns have smaller gain. So that would work for smaller distances. Yeah, and the 30 degree horns vice versa work for further away customers. So if your customer base has higher radius then you wanna go with those narrow beam width horns. Or the second option is that you basically build at the coverage depending on the you just patch it together from various types of horns. And that's for the cases when the customers are not spread out around the site in a symmetrical way, let's say or in distances that are more or less the same. So you can just patch the coverage depending on what you need. And eventually, even when you do so whatever you do, you can add and change horns as needed. So if some sector will start growing and more customer people will come ask you about, hey, can I also connect to the internet? Can you connect me? You're not limited with horns. You know, you can basically just respond to any situation when the customer base is changing. So the uniform coverage is pretty straightforward. You have dense customer base at some distance from the side and you just use the corresponding number of horns. And again, as I mentioned for closer in distances, you can use the wider bandwidth horns with smaller gain. And on the other hand, if the distances are bigger you wanna use those narrower horns. The custom coverage is really what I would say or call the art of what's possible or the art of what's needed in this case. So in some directions, the customers might be spread out somewhat further. In another cases, they might be closed in. And based on that, you just choose the corresponding bandwidth of the horns that will do the job. And this you can do or let's say, you might be thinking, well, okay but how do I decide about that? How do I see what horn will do what job? Depending on where my customers are. And here again, I would point you to our link calculator which I mentioned before in connection with optimizing the down tilt. So and the change your customer base again is not a problem. While with the traditional patch array sectors previously it might have been quite an issue. You only have that many options. There is just a few beam with types with the traditional sectors. You can have and not speaking of the gain they can achieve. It's usually high gain of somewhere around 20 dbi and the angle start around 80, 90 degrees. While with horns, you have the tools with quite a big or fine resolution. So the beam width of horns increase from 30 to 90 degrees with 10 degree steps. And that's when the symmetrical horns and with asymmetrical horns, there's 30, 60 and 90. And finally there is 24 dbi gain and 15 degrees beam width withdrawn. And here are a few examples. If you're wondering like how many of sectors can you really put up on a single tower? And these are not our images. We didn't stage those. These are photos from our customers from actual deployments. So even the very high density site is absolutely no problem for horns. So the scalability, the horns provide you is really unlimited. So I would sum up what we just talked about until now. And the advices here are use the correct gain horn. No longer you need to stick to the high gain patch rate sectors. And in fact, it's actually better to use as smaller gain as possible. Contrary to what your intuition or your colleagues might be telling you at the optimum gain of the axis point antenna is actually the smallest possible. Second, be aware where your customers are. And that goes without saying, of course you need to know where they're located. But that was of course in connection with the fact that the traditional patch rate sectors cover a lot bigger swath of distances and directions than declared by the manufacturers. And while the horns do not, they're very directional, very clear. The sectors are very well-defined. So be mindful of that. And then down tilt. Down tilt is your friend with horns unlike the traditional sectors. The horns again, because thanks to that symmetrical radiation pattern they're covering the whole area you point them at, even as close to the tower as you can imagine. And eventually you don't have to just believe what I'm saying here. Again, try our link calculator which really has the real world map data and we imported the radiation patterns over antennas to really help you figure out the optimum down tilt you should be using with them. And mind you, if you're not using any horns yet and are thinking about trying them, start with one. It's fair thing to do. I would do the same. Of course you wanna be careful with your business and with your spending. But in the end, it's definitely not the best approach. To just like chip in the horns wherever I have an emergency situation where the growing customer base is already screaming for that offloading sector. And eventually the biggest gain you can, the biggest gain you can leverage while with using horns is to actually replace all the sectors, the traditional sectors with horns. And eventually planning is a very good idea pretty much with anything you're doing. I mean, of course sometimes we can't help ourselves and fall in love head over heels with a person but thankfully the WIST networks are, we can manage to control ourselves enough to plan before we actually do anything. Planning is the alpha and omega of successful migration to horns. In case you have any questions about our products, I invite you to join our discussion forum, rfelab.com. Many questions have been already asked and answered so you can search through them naturally or ask your own questions if you have any. Sometimes our customers are not quite sure where to buy our products. So on our webpage, just the landing page rfelab.com you'll see the top menu bar and there's the stock locator. And then after you select the product you're looking for and the region where you're located, it will show you the nearest distributors to your physical location. On our YouTube channel, you can find a playlist with the name Wisp Traveler. And of course I can try my best and talk for hours about our products. But in the end, to hear about the horns and how they work for the wisps from your fellow colleagues is probably the best testimonial we could ask for. And this is why we have recorded these Wisps Travelers where our customers from all around the world speak about our products and how they help them. Another playlist we have on YouTube is called Inside Wireless. And this is a series of short educational videos on all kinds of topics from the world of art. So where you're an experienced Wisp or a beginner, doesn't matter, you either refresh your knowledge or learn something new. And finally, I would advise you to join or follow us on the social media channels. We're announcing releases of new products or when we post a new video, release a new video and release a recording of the webinar such as this one on Facebook or if you subscribe to our YouTube channel, you'll be the first one to know. Yeah, thank you, thank you Ian. Thank you to the attendees, to everybody who found the time to join us for this webinar. And I'm looking forward to the following ones. Thank you. Have a nice day.