Review: Point-to-Point Systems: Page 4 of 15

Beyond The Numbers

Each vendor had its own way of aiding the alignment of antennas during installation. Proxim and Motorola both use audible tones, while Alvarion provides a signal-strength indicator, shown through a series of LEDs, on the radio itself. While both provide the same basic functionality--indicating signal quality--we lean toward Alvarion's LED option. Audible tones are less intuitive, and their relatively high frequency may be problematic for those with hearing impairments or in noisy outdoor environments.

All the radios provide indications of signal strength through their management interfaces and, in fact, management was the area of greatest differentiation in our testing. Although all the products could be managed through SNMP, on-board management options varied substantially.

Motorola has the most extensive Web-based GUI; it even provides a variety of graphs that include historical data to aid in troubleshooting faulty links; however, its command-line interface wasn't available to us--only the vendor's engineers can use the CLI. Yeah, we didn't like that either. Proxim's graphical Web interface, while functional, could certainly stand the touch of a UI designer to spiff things up. On the plus side, Proxim did add console and telnet management in addition to its GUI. Alvarion provides a GUI utility that can be installed on a client PC, but it lacks an HTTP interface. The menu-driven CLI works well enough, but lacks some of the flash of the other alternatives.

Alvarion BreezeNet B100