How reliable is microwave versus leased lines or fiber optics?
You can expect microwave to be a lot more reliable than your typical leased T1, and that’s one of the main reasons to go with it. In wireless parlance, we refer to uptime as “link availability”. The published uptime figure for leased lines is 99.985%, meaning that you can anticipate being out of service for .015% of the year. It sounds like splitting hairs, but you’ll see that it’s not. Consider where free space optics (e.g., laser / infrared) is often quoted in the 99% range for reliability, particularly on lengthy paths. Ninety-nine percent sounds great on the surface, but that one percent of downtime translates to more than three and a half days in a single year; a hefty blow to cost and productivity. That being said, a microwave radio connection should give you at lease “four-nines, meaning 99.99%, and many times it will give you five-nines. This means that the microwave link is not expected to go down at all, except from natural component death and in that case our mean time betwe
