Routed or bridged, there are few back haul radios available that can match the Mikrotik RouterOS software for features, tools, flexibility and cost. With features and flexibility comes complexity and confusion. I wanted to help dispel some of that confusion with this article. You may have lots of choices to make, but most of these choices are relatively simple decisions. And so, brave reader, proceed…
One reality that all WISPs face is that all radio communications are half-duplex. When one end of a link is “speaking”, the other end must be “listening”. For many applications, this is sufficient for our purpose. When a link becomes busy, however, some types of communications are negatively impacted by the delays caused by this behaviour. Mikrotik RouterOS offers some options to help you alleviate this congestion without breaking the bank. In this article, I will discuss the details for how to configure Mikrotik RouterOS and OSPF to provide a simulated full-duplex link with the added benefit of failover to half-duplex in the event of a single link failure.
This idea is taken from an article I wrote on my main website back in November of 2006.