As I always said lately:
Cambium forever!!!! :)
Here in Italy every wireless ISP used UBNT in the last few years and now we are experiencing troubles finding some free freq for doing links or making new AP.
Cambium are really more reliable with RF interference!
Let us know what you think about them! (except for web interface that is VERY slow!!!!!!!)
Best regards,
Paolo
Don't expect the ePMP gear to solve all of your problems. That said, your subscribers will probably see far more consistent service over UBNT M series regardless of the problems. Poor installs will drag down any system.
We've been going back and forth between ePMP and UBNT AC for months now. They both shine in low-noise environments, especially UBNT AC when lightly loaded, from a throughput perspective. The Cambium gear appears to be much more sensitive to noise, but when noise isn't the main issue it performs consistently regardless of other factors. Even in the face of noise though, so long as the CPE doesn't disconnect (my biggest issue, but I get why) performance is very predictable with ePMP.
We currently run ePMP for business customers who rely on voip. Residential and business customers that don't care about voip get installed on whatever performs better at their location, ePMP or UBNT AC.
What signals are you shooting for when installing, what channel widths, and what kind of latency/jitter are you seeing? Our UBNT AC works like trash with any bit of noise. Our first Cambium shipment is showing up Friday, and we've got ~700 M series radios and about ~300 UBNT AC radios deployed and the AC by far is the biggest pain, even running all AC (not mixed).
We aim for -65 at the CPE or better but I find that SNR is more important than a few db on RSSI. If we can keep SNR > 30 modulations are pretty stable on ePMP. Once it drops into the 27 and below range "it depends".
I'm looking at a particular CPE right now that has a downlink/uplink SNR of 31/36 though that can't maintain modulations to save it's life - right now at MCS 2/14. This particular CPE has another dish pointed almost directly at it about 500' away, though it is running at 5280 and my gear is at 5835. The CPE is overwhelmed by the noise though.
Latency is higher than UBNT obviously because I'm running 75/25 5ms frames but jitter is very good. Below are two smokeping plots from two subs, one on ePMP and one on UBNT AC. The sectors are on the same tower - both 60* - both with exactly the same tilt and azimuth. They have about 6' vertical spacing between them. Both are running 10Mhz channels and have the same output power (20 dBm)
Cambium
UBNT AC:
See, we're currently not installing less than -60dBm because of noise. On M series, we're seeing a lot of 117/130's, XW APs with PBE clients see 144 in a lot of locations, where we may have an occassional CPE linked at -68dBm, but an average RX signal of -58dBm across 30 stations and with even 20-30Mbps of traffic, the GUI is slow as all get out, and we see latency rise and jitter all over the place.
With Cambium, we're planning the initial deployment to like UBNT AC, everyone is -55dBm or stronger to make sure we're well above 30dB CINR, so I'm hoping we see great results with Cambium under the same conditions.
With Cambium I agree that even with signals around -65, even -68 db, but with SNR 24 db, we always get MCS 12/12 or better!! Even at 10 km (with a Force200).
On the AP we use TDD Flexible and 5 ms of frame... we have profile of 20 Mbps in download and customers are satisfied with always full bandwidth.
@paolo-pftech wrote:With Cambium I agree that even with signals around -65, even -68 db, but with SNR 24 db, we always get MCS 12/12 or better!! Even at 10 km (with a Force200).
On the AP we use TDD Flexible and 5 ms of frame... we have profile of 20 Mbps in download and customers are satisfied with always full bandwidth.
How many subs per AP with those statistics? I'm shooting for MCS14/15, and will definitely be taking advantage of the epmp 2000 + beamforming RX antenna to optimize RX at the AP signals. Airtime is valuable, so is spectrum, so I'm looking to really load mine up compared to Ubiquiti.
With UBNT RocketM we noticed that when we reached about 18-25 clients connected to the same AP, they started getting poor performance.
With Cambium ePMP 1000 we've reached already 20 clients connected without notice any problem... they said we can reach almost 40 clients without problem!
I’m running around 15 subs per AP at 25 Mbps and 50 Mbps packages with no problems. Subs are 1 to 3 miles from AP on mix of Force 180 and 200. Never was able to do that with UBNT AC gear.
Ken.
I'll be brief.
I was a UBNT "fanboy". Wholly supported them, they could do no wrong..
(Even bought a butt load of 3.65s which are absolute junk and are programmed to be that way!)
Then it dawned on me, their "market" are their beta testers. In six years of buying UBNT, not ONE "new release" was ready to be released. Everyone of their "new" products are flawed, in some way. There's always a problem.
UBNTs can do a lot that you can't do with ePMPs. Namely because up until about the last few firmwares, regulations didn't matter so much for them. You can overpower a UBNT and you can't a Cambium.
Over all, Cambium APs beat UBNTs. They can process the packets and handle the heavy loads, UBNTs simply can't.
RMA with Cambium is a nightmare.. UBNT, you send an email, they check the unit, you mail it back. SImple. I think Cambium is insulted with the suggestion of an RMA. (And we've seen more than a few lately.)
Cambiums are "twitchy". Set 'em and forget 'em and you're good. IF you have to keep tweekin them, they'll get angry.
PtP Cambium rules, hands down.. I can push more bandwidth on a comparable link than UBNT. Their pings are higher, about +20 ms higher. IF you've got a really "clean" link, good LoS, set it to "mater/slave" and you'll drop that +20 ms.
We've got over 1000 radios running, some in very congested areas, about a 70/30 split (mostly UBNTs) and IF I could do it all over again, it would be 100% Cambium.
Over simplified, but that's my experience.
Good luck!
J.
Thanks for the input Jack. I've had a really good experience so far on the AP and CPE's I've been converting over to Cambium. The throughput with ubnt was about 3 mbps before and now it's 50 mbps. It's just insanse! I get you about UBNT. I've been a fanboy for a while. Not anymore. Here's something I had posted which got a lot of hits and feedback.
http://community.ubnt.com/t5/The-Lounge/What-s-going-on-with-UBNT/m-p/1558608#U1558608
I would like to ask hw/sweet configuration :
- what are the sector antenna? Cambium 15dB 90 degrees or other?
- do you use cambium gps sync sector or not?
Actually we are using cambium 15 dB original sector antenna and gps synced epmp 1000 sectors.
Effectively no one of our cambium cpe's customers calls as for problems, instead we receive a lot of calls per day by our mikrotik's cpe customers.
Right now I deployed Cambium's ePMP in a small community with an omni. I'll be posting a story about that. We are not using the gps sync just yet as we are transitioning CPE's over from Ubiquiti. Once all CPE's are ePMP then I'll turn on gps sync. So far so good. I went from 3mbps average on a UBNT CPE to over 50 Mbps on Cambium's ePMP line.
I'm absolutely amazed!
Assembling a bunch of Force200's and getting ready to go transition a non-Cambium AP with 17 clients on it over to Cambium. Weather permitting, we should get this done next week hopefully, and I'll post as much details about the pros and cons as I can.
We've been using the 2ghz verson a lot. and its been wonderful.
we deployed 180 ubnt 2ghz stations/beams/rockets for cpes in a tight area, self interference was a major problem. getting more than 15 subs on AP was a problem. on the backhaul feeding the area, we would only see 70 to 100 meg at night, and of course getting angry customers over speed.
we've nearly completely changed that area to cambium 2ghz, since then, we are delivering speeds up to 15 mbps, on 10 mhz channels dependably through peak.
1) we are able to install subs as low as 75 db and get good speeds. self interference is almost gone.
2)we stopped using channel 1 completely and all sub routers are there.
3)our backhaul load has tripled in time we've started the changing the equipment
4)speed complaints have stopped.
in town, we've used the 5ghz to offer speeds up to 50 meg with solid, consistant delivery.
one other thing the EPMP can do , the UBNT can't do, if you want to give bandwidth prioty to a sub you can, the ubnt you can give it a little more prefrence, but you cant truely assign priorty.
Thanks for this. I run mostly 2.4 gear due to trees. They're all short-range: <1km but I have already seen the problem with UBNT Rockets handling only 10-15 clients well. If one client drops to -72, forget it.
Most feedback on Cambium is the 5GHz, so I'm looking for 2.4 success stories.
- New member, glad to be here.
@robgmann wrote:Thanks for this. I run mostly 2.4 gear due to trees. They're all short-range: <1km but I have already seen the problem with UBNT Rockets handling only 10-15 clients well. If one client drops to -72, forget it.
Most feedback on Cambium is the 5GHz, so I'm looking for 2.4 success stories.
- New member, glad to be here.
we are mostly 2.4 and the performance is hardly comparable to UBNT. we get solid, constant performance from the cambium hardware. a -72 sub is just fine. (with low noise) my personal connection athome is a 2.4ghz force 200, i'm registered at -77 down and see 25 meg off peak and 12 to 15 during peak. noise to my home is pretty good. my uplinkis 73 and the noise at the tower is higher, so i normally get 1 to 3 meg up.
the biggest things epmp can offer you over UBNT is GPS (works wonders) and a solid frame (1 sub can't trash your sector)
the GPS cures self uplink interference from CO band APs. you can also recycle channels.
the MAC is broken up by time rather than through put. the schedule gives each CPE a slice of time to talk, and when to talk.
UBNT isn't so well organized (thats why to many subs kill them) they still use CSMA in other words, 10 children yelling at the teacher all at once, things work smoothly when each kid waits there turn ;)
thanks to that GPS, and the solid MAC that i over simplified, when the noise floor allows, which i've found you are normally your own worst enemy when it comes to noise. you can run to significantly lower RSSIs while providing decent service. attached is an AP with very weak subs, I'm personally one of them.
I've shared plenty of stories on the forum from our use of 2.4 including duel band sectors and i'll answer anything i can for you. welcome to cambium! you'll love it here.
here is the performance by modulations on my CPE
Switched over to Cambium in a troubled community. Absolutely happy with the results!
for slow GUI problem Paolo, please change Configuration > System > Web Page update to 20 instead default 5 value.
Hello
I changed my network of over 1500 members from ubnt to cambium I will never look back. The new epmp 1000 and 2000 equipment works very well compared to ubnt. I was a long time canopy user been waiting for cambium to launch there latest equipment. My techs just put up 3, 450I 900mhz APs and started switching over the old ubnt 900 I am quite amazed on how these new 900 radios are working. We have some subscribers who went from -78db with very high noise floor to -60db with little to no interference after tweaking our old aps. We also experienced a throughtput increase of over 20 mbps compared to 4mbps on the ubnt. Switching to Cambium from ubnt was the best decision our company has done. Since our launch in 2000.
Cheers
Mike
