Long Term Ubiquiti - airFiber 5XHD

Ubiquiti Inc. has been providing professional solutions for both ISPs and business customers for 10 years. The well-established position on the market has made Ubiquiti very popular. Continuous technological development and affordable prices make the devices still remain in the world's leading position.

The need for bandwidth and performance of network devices makes Ubiquiti Inc. constantly innovate their products. AirMAX® TDMA protocol, active RF PRISM® filtering or GPS synchronization. All this was aimed at 100% utilization of the potential of the chipset cooperating with the 802.11 protocol.

Of course, the demand for bandwidth has increased significantly over the years and that is why Ubiquiti Inc. presented a new solution based on the innovative LTU protocol in 2018 - Ubiquiti's long-term vision...

airFiber 5XHD - because that's what the latest protocol-based radio is called LTU - is the successor of a very popular device airFiber 5X and, at the same time, a great addition to the commercial offer of efficient point to point solutions.

AF-5XHD works similarly to its predecessor in the 5GHz band, but runs on a new, specially designed LTU processor and the new airOS LTU software.

By using the new LTU processor, a very high radio band utilisation rate of 21.2bps/Hz has been achieved.
In combination with 4096 QAM modulation (available in the new software version) and 100MHz channel width, we can achieve 1.34Gbps radio bandwidth.

Nevertheless, airFiber 5XHD also has a very good packet throughput of 2,000,000 packets per second.

You should also be aware that LTU is a completely new platform based on its own technology, which does not use 802.11n or is not compatible with 802.11n and 802.11ac devices. Of course it also is not compatible with airMAX M5 and airMAX 5AC devices.

But even though LTU is based on airFiber technology, it uses a completely different protocol for communication, which makes it also not compatible with other airFiber 5GHz products - airFiber 5X or airFiber 5/airFiber 5U.

The most important features of the new radio from Ubiquiti based on the LTU protocol include support for different frequencies for RX and TX, redundant power supply thanks to two Gigabit PoE ports and adaptive modulation up to 1024 QAM.

As already mentioned, the tests were performed in both TCP and UDP.

First, tests were performed using the built-in Ubiquiti tool.

The next step is to carry out tests using MikroTik and the indispensable MikroTik Btest tool.

You can see below the results of the tests carried out in the TCP protocol using MikroTik Btest.

As you can see from the graphics, the results are very promising. Taking into account that the conditions were rough and the weather was not favourable to us because of the very strong wind in the open air, the results are at a high level.

And what is best, you can see it for yourselves in our movie :)

The attenuation was negligible, so we couldn't see how much innovation the new protocol LTU introduces, which goes beyond the 802.11 protocol family.

Generally, the successor to airFiber 5X is doing a very decent job. Although we didn't use 100MHz channel width in the tests, we managed to put together a very decent PTP link, which was able to flip over 300Mbps at a distance of 1.5km in 50MHz channel width.

But we're probably most interested in how airFiber 5XHD works with other ISPs... That's why we invite you to discuss it on our social networking sites and in our online forum at https://www.forum.batna24.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=2611 .

Author:

Leszek Błaszczyk

[email protected]