If you’re a service provider you know nature can be unpredictable. Ryan Grewell, founder and general manager of Smart Way Communications, recently experienced extreme weather that impacted his infrastructure in Ohio. Albeit a stressful and unfortunate situation for him and his team, they were able to see how their Tarana G1 deployment handled this tough situation, which Ryan later took to the “Wisp Talk” Facebook group to share.
As the photo above shows, strong winds took down one of his towers although “When the tower fell, we didn’t actually know,” said Ryan. “I drove down to the site to investigate. When we got up there the tower was a mangled mess of scrap.” He flipped the breakers at the tower and shortly after that he started getting messages asking why the internet was down. Little did Ryan realize, despite the damage to the tower and equipment, his Tarana G1 base node was still servicing 15-20 customers. “I think it’s crazy that it had people served when it [was] 80 feet lower and turned toward the ground, but somehow it did,” he said on a recent Facebook post. “I know I have the reputation of being the Tarana fanboy but I had to post about this photo.”
Once Ryan got a new tower in place, he also realized the G1 base node’s case was cracked. He fixed the crack with silicon and it’s now on the temporary tower serving 40 customers. “[This is a] true testament to how insane the technology behind Tarana is.” Ryan added.
Many industry firsts and breakthroughs go into delivering this kind of result. Dale Branlund, Tarana CTO, gave us a peek into what was happening under the hood: “Losing 80 feet of elevation lost plenty of system gain and link budget. Fortunately, G1 is constantly optimizing for changing RF conditions 5,000 per second and with automatic adaptive modulation and coding, as well as automatic fade and power adjustments. The base node and remote nodes adaptively adjust their antenna array patterns and beamformers to the new propagation conditions. This is Tarana’s unique distributed massive MIMO at work.
The multipath environment also changed substantially, some signals coming through foliage and others affected by ground bounce reflections. This was no problem for G1, which optimally assembles multipath signals across each subcarrier in a subband to create the strongest combined signal and thus mitigating frequency-selective fading. The end result is a robust reconnected link that, while at a reduced rate, is still reliable enough to continue operation.”
We obviously don’t recommend operating G1 in these exceptional conditions, but this does demonstrate well the power and adaptability of the platform.
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