Was just wondering about the future of NLOS PTP and the Cambium product line.
The 450 900 MHz PTP radio outperforms a few other vendor solutions that I have used in the past.
What I would like to know is there anything in the Cambium pipeline that will outperform the 450 900 MHz PTP radio in NLOS scenarios.
Would hate to see Cambium loose interest in this portion of the market.
For the past two years I’ve been living under a rock and haven’t kept up with Cambium or the forum.
Stay Safe.
Right now Cambium's 900MHz product is the best unlicensed band PtP available that I know of. It's the only FPGA based solution as well. All the others that I've seen are WiFi based. The only thing that might be better would be a PTP450 variant for the 700Mhz 'white spaces' area, but that comes with a bunch of other issues that are inherent to using the band.
As far as licensed links go, assuming you can even get a license, you could try using 2.5GHz PTP800 and high gain dishes, but I actually have a 2.5 license and in my experience the PTP450 on 900mhz out performs it.
Lastly, there are other solutions that handle trees arguably better then PTP450, like LTE on 3.65GHz... but again, there are some inherent issues with using LTE as it's not designed for PtP use. You'd also need to get a 3.65 license, and the FCC isn't issuing them anymore, so you'd have to buy one on eBay. The cost and complexity of deploying LTE for just a PtP connection would be very high compared to PTP450. And even then, there's no guarantee that it would work.
I asked my magic 8-ball if we'd see more advanced PtP equipment specifically for high capacity NLOS links in unlicensed space from Cambium or anyone for that matter and it said:
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This is disappointing but not unexpected.
Just from a quick glance at the forums it seems that the bread and butter is PMP or LOS PTP BH.
It makes you wonder about the future of the WISP industry and the unlicensed space and whether we will see government and big teleco reclaim all the airwaves.