Ubiquiti airFiber: the path decides which radio you buy
A point-to-point link gets quoted as a pair of radios. It is really bought as a path — two mounting points, the air between them, and the weather that crosses it. Ubiquiti’s airFiber platform is strong equipment, but the site survey, not the datasheet, decides whether the link is still passing traffic at two in the morning during a July thunderstorm.
Clearance, measured from the mount and not from the ground
Optical line of sight is not the standard. A radio link needs a clear ellipsoid around the beam — the Fresnel zone — and it needs that clearance at the exact height the antennas will sit. Paths across metro Atlanta cross mature pine and hardwood canopy that keeps growing after the link is commissioned, so the profile has to be surveyed with headroom rather than to today’s treetops. Rooftop paths around Cumberland and Perimeter fail for a different reason: parapets, screen walls and mechanical penthouses on the near building block the first few hundred feet of the shot and are almost invisible in aerial imagery.
Band, throughput and rain
airFiber in the license-free 24 GHz band carries more than 1.4 Gbps of throughput at ranges up to 13 km, which covers most building-to-building and campus backhaul work, and the band can be deployed without a spectrum license. The trade is atmospheric. Attenuation from rain climbs steeply with frequency, and Georgia produces high short-duration rain rates through the summer convective season. A 24 GHz hop between two buildings on a Cumberland campus behaves nothing like one reaching across open ground outside Macon. On a long span the honest answer is frequently a shorter hop with a relay site, or a lower band with more fade margin, rather than a bigger dish on an over-length path.
What airFiber does with the spectrum
airFiber uses Hybrid Division Duplex, which pairs the latency behavior of frequency division duplex with the spectral efficiency of time division duplex. A dual-antenna design with self-interference cancellation lets the radio extract more usable channels from crowded unlicensed spectrum than comparable systems, and the built-in configuration tool walks channel bandwidth, transmit power and related parameters so the link budget and the interference profile are set deliberately. That tool is only as good as its inputs, so run a spectrum scan from both endpoints before committing to a channel plan. Dense rooftops in Atlanta and Savannah already carry other unlicensed links.
Mounting, grounding and Georgia weather
Narrow-beam links are unforgiving of movement. A mast that flexes in wind will drop the link long before anything breaks, so the mount matters as much as the radio. Coastal-plain sites near Savannah carry hurricane wind loading on the structure and the attachment; inland sites still see straight-line gusts from summer storms. Every link needs bonding and grounding at both ends, surge protection on the Ethernet run where it enters the building, and a UPS on the switch feeding the radio. Lightning damage to wireless backhaul in Georgia usually arrives through the copper, not the antenna.
Before you order the radios
- Confirmed roof or tower access and a structural attachment point at each end.
- GPS coordinates and mount elevation for both sites, not street addresses.
- An obstruction profile along the whole path, including expected tree growth.
- A spectrum scan from each endpoint taken at the height the radio will occupy.
- Cable pathway, PoE budget, grounding and surge protection designed at both ends.
- Written roof rights from the property owner wherever the mount is not on your own building.
Send us the two endpoints and what the link has to carry, and we will tell you whether airFiber is the right answer or whether the path needs a different approach first. KSEDCO, 2700 Cumberland Pkwy SE, Suite 410, Atlanta GA 30339. Call (888) 360-0035 or use our contact page.