Convince me to switch from Ubiquiti

Hey guys, first post here. I've been using Ubiquiti products for the last few years, and lately I have been having loads of problems. Problems range from low throughput to CPE radios dropping off of the AP's. They've been having a lot of firmware issues lately, and it seems like they just can't get anything ironed out, and they rely on us  to work out the bugs for them. 

Unfortunately ubnt is not much help with any of their support, and we've been having too many frustrated customers calling in and cancelling service to due buggy firmware and low throughput issues. We have one sector that is also dropping subscribers randomly for no apparent reason, and we cannot get the issue resolved no matter what we do (replace hardware, firmware, cabling, power, etc.). I'm at the point of possibly swapping this AP and subcribers to a Cambium ePMP1000 sector and Force 200 radios to start, and see if any of my issues go away and make for a better user experience.

I see that they sell the non-synchronized version as well as the synchronized version of the ePMP1000 radio, along with a much higher price for the synced version. Can anyone let me know how much improvement I could possibly see in a somewhat noisy environment between the two? Also, we use 3.65 ubnt sectors as well. Does Cambium offer a 3.65 solution at a decent pricepoint? Or should we see about swapping over (or adding) 2.4Ghz AP's as well? We do have quite a bit of tree coverage, and that is our biggest downfall with 3.65 and 5ghz spectrums.

Any help would be GREATLY appreciated!

Thanks

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Good afternoon,

I too was in the same boat about a year ago.  I starting having problems with different things, half baked products, throughput issues, problematic firmware and then end up just throwing up more hardware until it just works.  I still deploy UBNT devices today because I just can't justify ripping out what is existing and replacing it with new equipment.  As we have grown though I haven't been putting up UBNT, I've been replacing that hardware with EPMP ap's.  I now have a mix of UBNT's and EPMP's on my towers and as we replace CPE's we are replacing them with EPMP's.  I think every vendor has there +'s and -'s, I think AC1 and AC2 are great, cnmaestro is getting there.  For stability and reliability I get far few calls from our EPMP deployments. 

I'm not sure how big your environment is but we are over 600 UBNT devices and just surpassed our 100 EPMP install so we have a pretty mixed environment.  We are upgrading 2 more towers in the next couple of weeks and installing EPMP AP's.  This will run side by side our UBNT deployments until we migrate more of our clients over to the new AP's. 

I haven't utilized any of the synced versions because our spectrum is pretty clean where I'm at and I'm not sure how much of a difference it would make.  I know that I wouldn't put more than 30 CPE's on a UBNT sector, I have a EPMP sector with over 40+ (we are adding another) and it hasn't missed a beat.

Hope that helps,

Ryo

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@bleger wrote:

I see that they sell the non-synchronized version as well as the synchronized version of the ePMP1000 radio, along with a much higher price for the synced version. Can anyone let me know how much improvement I could possibly see in a somewhat noisy environment between the two?


If you have just a single ePMP AP then it really won't be any better with Sync.  But as soon as you have a full circle of ePMP sectors on a tower, and/or they can see other synced APs in the distance, then sync saves the day.

If you're looking to save the up front cost while you test things, you can run a single sector without sync, but will need to replace the radio with a proper synced AP in the future.  You can also look into the ePMP AP lite product - same radio as the ful AP and the ePMP Force 110 synced backhauls, it just limits you to (IIRC) 10 client devices that are allowed to connect.  Later you can unlock via license fee & code to make it a full AP.

j

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@bleger wrote:

Hey guys, first post here. I've been using Ubiquiti products for the last few years, and lately I have been having loads of problems. Problems range from low throughput to CPE radios dropping off of the AP's. They've been having a lot of firmware issues lately, and it seems like they just can't get anything ironed out, and they rely on us  to work out the bugs for them. 

Unfortunately ubnt is not much help with any of their support, and we've been having too many frustrated customers calling in and cancelling service to due buggy firmware and low throughput issues. We have one sector that is also dropping subscribers randomly for no apparent reason, and we cannot get the issue resolved no matter what we do (replace hardware, firmware, cabling, power, etc.). I'm at the point of possibly swapping this AP and subcribers to a Cambium ePMP1000 sector and Force 200 radios to start, and see if any of my issues go away and make for a better user experience.

I see that they sell the non-synchronized version as well as the synchronized version of the ePMP1000 radio, along with a much higher price for the synced version. Can anyone let me know how much improvement I could possibly see in a somewhat noisy environment between the two? Also, we use 3.65 ubnt sectors as well. Does Cambium offer a 3.65 solution at a decent pricepoint? Or should we see about swapping over (or adding) 2.4Ghz AP's as well? We do have quite a bit of tree coverage, and that is our biggest downfall with 3.65 and 5ghz spectrums.

Any help would be GREATLY appreciated!

Thanks


Hi bleger, 

First of all, welcome to the community! We have a lot of amazing community members here who share thier stories, deployments, experiences and issues. A lot of these members use the full complement of Cambium products and are a fantastic source of information on them. 

Regarding your questions. There is virtually no difference, RF performance capability wise, between the Synchronized and the non-synchronized ePMP 1000 radios. The key things that the synchronized radio provides over the non-synchronized are:

1. On-board GPS chip and the ability to receive sync from an external source such as a CMM4, UGPS or other third party sync sources

2. Gigabit Ethernet, although the Force 180 and Force 200 products have Gigabit Ethernet ports on them.

3. Dual flash banks. This provides redundancy in case of a failure on one of the flash banks. The GPS radios is typically used as an AP and having that redundancy helps, i.e losing an SM/CPE is not as bad as losing an AP taking down the whole sector!

4. Standard 802.3af PoE with an input of upto 56 VDC. 

In terms of interference tolerance, there is no difference between the two radios. The both come with same proprietary  TDD MAC with eFortify technology that uses advanced scheduler mechanisms, rate adapt and ARQ algorithms. But if you plan to reuse frequency and reduce self interference, then the GPS radios is key. 

Currently there are no plans to offer the ePMP 1000 or ePMP 2000 line in the 3 GHz band. However, Cambium offers this band on the PMP 450 product line. The PMP 450 product line also offers the 900 MHz variant with excellent nLOS and NLOS capabilities. 

Once again, welcome to the community. Glad to have you here. 

Thanks,

Sriram

2 Likes

Sounds like the sync would be the way to go if we would move forward with the 2.4 frequency, which we don't currently use. I know there are other WISP's in the area that do use it, so any way that we can preserve some of the spectrum and offer it ourselves would definitely benefit us and get our proof to install ratio up. As I mentioned earlier, the  trees are our worst enemy out here only offering 3.65 and 5ghz.

I do have another stupid question. With Ubiquiti, we have our CPE radios setup in router mode, with a static private IP for the management, and a dhcp server handing out a public IP on a separate vlan. Can you setup the Cambium products this way also, or would I need to modify our setup with this?

> With Ubiquiti, we have our CPE radios setup in router mode, with a static private IP for the management

ePMP has the option to configure a separate management interface with its own IP address (we use 10.10.#.# for management interfaces).  You can also configure the customer radio so that it can not be accessed from the LAN port if you are concerned about your customers trying to access the radio.  With those two options  set the only way to access the customer radio is through the wireless interface using the separate management interface IP address.

Or you can just configure the separate management interface , allow access via the Ethernet, and then it is accessible via the LAN port by several IPs ( the separate management IP, the LAN IP, 169.254.1.1, 192.168.0.2) 

As far as GPS sync goes you can think of it as an RF shield that blocks 100% of the RF from other  Access Points   using the same GPS sync.  GPS sync only prevents the AP's from interfering with each other though so if you have a customer radio that can see two or more APs running the same frequency as the AP it is connected to then that customer radio will interfear with those other APs and be interfered by those other APs.

So if you are doing ABAB and you have customer on one of the A's and that customer is close enough see and be seen by the other A then GPS sync will not stop that customer radio from interfering with or being interfered with the other A sector. Only the sectors front / back ratio will help you there and/or shielding.

We are in the middle of changing out all of our ubiquiti gear with ePMP and the biggest reason is GPS sync.  We had reached a point with Ubiquiti where we could not deploy even one more AP without that AP interfering with one of our other Ubiquiti APs. We were completely out of spectrum.  With GPS sync the AP's become invisible to each other allowing us to reuse spectrum we could not reuse before and expand.  


With only two exceptions so far every single customer we have changed over from Ubiquiti to ePMP have commented on how much better their internet runs "Since you put that new satellite on"  yeah they call the radios satellites and there's nothing ever going to change that I don't think. 

The ePMP is predictable, it works where you expect it to work and does so constantly. The Ubiquiti gear was completely unpredictable and inconsistent. 

If you are going to swap out Ubiquiti for ePMP then more great news ! With the exception of the 5Ghz connectorized customer radio all the ePMP radios will run on the existing  Ubiquiti power supplies. So you don't have to wait for customers to be home before you swap you can schedule it any time and swap it out while they are at work or whateverbecause you don't need in the house/business.

The only real frustration with the ePMP is their absolutely terrible user interface..  It is soooo slow and has little quirks that seem designed to infuriate  the poor guy/gal standing on a ladder in 100degree heat, glaring sunlight trying to juggle a radio and phone so so he/she can aim it.  Aiming the radios takes a lot longer than Ubiquiti because the interface is slow and frustrating.  It really feels like someone at cambium went out of their way to build in lots of little things to just infuriate and slow down installers.  

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@bleger wrote:

I see that they sell the non-synchronized version as well as the synchronized version of the ePMP1000 radio, along with a much higher price for the synced version. Can anyone let me know how much improvement I could possibly see in a somewhat noisy environment between the two?

Any help would be GREATLY appreciated!


Hi Bieger and welcome. :)


Well, Cambium calls their radio flavors 'GPS Synced' and 'non-Synced', but we mostly refer to those simply as AP and SM. Typically a GPS Synced radios would only be used as an AP (although technically, it can be configured as a SM/CPE) and typically most of the non-Synced models would usually be used as SM's, (although technically, they can be configured as AP's if you wish).  SO - in a way, the way they are names makes it unnecessarily complex - however, to be fair, since ANY ePMP radio can be configured as an AP, a SM or in a PTP configuration, they are correct to call them 'GPS Synced' and 'non Synced' I guess.

Now - as  far as performance goes, there's two things I would say on that.

1st) The 'interference ability' of ePMP is amazing.  We took out some ''non-Cambium'' gear in 2.4ghz that is shooting about 4KM right over the center of town, and on that ''non-Cambium'' gear, we were luckly to get 1-2 Mbit per second.  Sometimes, (at 3 AM) I 'might' be able to get 3 or 5 mbit through it, but typically it'd struggle to get 1 - 2 Mbit. So, I took down the non-Cambium AP and plugged in a GPS Synced ePMP1000 2.4Ghz (AP) 'connectorized' version. Same sector antenna, same everything.  I then went to my house and disconnected my non-Cambium SM I was runing and plugged in a ePMP1000 2.4Ghz 'connectorized' non-Synced (SM) into the existing antenna.  So - same exact mounts and antennas.

Performance went from ~1-2 mbit if I was lucky, to 20-40 Mbit depending on the settings.  This is 2.4Ghz, right in a city of 40,000 people - shooting ~4 km over the town, and I can hear dozens and dozens  dozens of routers trying to interfere. I now have my CPE programmed to 10Mbit/1Mbit and that's exactly what I get all the time.

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@bleger wrote:

I see that they sell the non-synchronized version as well as the synchronized version of the ePMP1000 radio, along with a much higher price for the synced version. Can anyone let me know how much improvement I could possibly see in a somewhat noisy environment between the two?

Any help would be GREATLY appreciated!


What I can also tell you about GPS vs Non-GPS is basically stuff that others have already told you.

A) The only plave GPS equipment comes into play is on the AP side of things.  The AP does all the scheduling for all it's SM's, so only the AP side needs to be GPS gear. I know some people are confused (and I know that some other manufacturer's sometimes spread a little FUD about this) and might think that the whole network somehow needs to be $500 radios, and that's NOT the situation.  If you want to have a GPS Synced network (and you do) then only the AP's are the GPS Synced variety.

B) The only thing that GPS Syncing does for you is to help mittigate self-interference (or competative interference with any competitor willing to co-ordinate).  Those two things are huge - especially the self-interference part. Basically (as other's have said) this will allow all your AP's to transmit at the same instant, and to all go into RX mode at the exact same instant. With the 'non-Cambium' gear, while one AP is trying to listen to it's clients, another one of your AP's might be TXing and if they are on the same tower, or even if they are a couple miles away, the TXing AP can be heard at a -50 or -70 by the RXing AP and that can kill eaches ability to hear their own clients.  With GPS Syncing, all your AP's  will TX at the same instant, and RX at the same instant and the  worst source of loud interference (self interference) is essentially gone.  Now, you can still have other sources of interference, but the self- interference  is dramatically reduced and the difference is huge.

Also, as other's have mentioned, in the 5Ghz versions, Cambium does have an AP (a GPS Synced radio) that is a LITE version.  It's basically the same hardware as the regular version, but only licensed for a small POP with up to 10 clients. The beauty is that if you need to go past 10 clients, you can just buy an upgrade license and get the full 'unlimited' version without having to climb and change anything out.  So, for me - I'd recommend to do that rather than to start with a non-Synced radio as an AP.  You 'can' go non-Synced if you want, but for my 2c - you'll want to have the  hardware up there that is GPS aware. :)

Unfortunately, Cambium does add to the confusion a bit because in 2.4Ghz, they don't have the 'LITE' version on the AP.  So, your choices in 2.4Ghz would be either non-Synced or the 'Full' version. However, they have been running a ''buy 2 get 3'' special on the 2.4Ghz AP's, so that brings the prices closer into line with the 'LITE' AP's I suppose.

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I really appreciate the help guys! You’re definitely opening my eyes and I’m looking forward to trying to get approval from management to get some of the cambium gear. The 5ghz lite version sounds exactly what we need for now. We are a relatively small wisp, with 300ish subs…we do not have a whole lot of APS that have more than 10 SMs, so this gives us some flexibility and cost savings for sure.

On another note, we’re using 3.65 ubnt gear also and I’m seeing a lot of self interference. In your in your opinion, should I scrap 365 ubnt and go with 2.4 cambium synced gear? Your throughput story is amazing and if I can get that type of thoughput with a better propagation than 365, we’d probably double our customers in no time.

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http://community.cambiumnetworks.com/t5/ePMP-Stories/Transition-from-UBNT-to-Cambium/m-p/55801#U55801

I hope that convinces you.

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@bleger wrote:
I really appreciate the help guys! You're definitely opening my eyes and I'm looking forward to trying to get approval from management to get some of the cambium gear. The 5ghz lite version sounds exactly what we need for now. We are a relatively small wisp, with 300ish subs....we do not have a whole lot of APS that have more than 10 SMs, so this gives us some flexibility and cost savings for sure.

On another note, we're using 3.65 ubnt gear also and I'm seeing a lot of self interference. In your in your opinion, should I scrap 365 ubnt and go with 2.4 cambium synced gear? Your throughput story is amazing and if I can get that type of thoughput with a better propagation than 365, we'd probably double our customers in no time.

if you've got room with the noise floor, yes go to 2.4 from 3.65    2.4 will punch through the trees better than 3.65

another thread on this same topic i posted some screen shots of my own CPE, i'm connected at -76 DB getting 25x3 off peak, and 12 to 15 meg on peak with 9 other subs on the panel i'm connected to...

if you need to stay at 3.65, look at the 450 prduct. it does cost a good deal more, but the performance is even better than the EPMP.   and you can run at far weaker powers.      

trying to compare 450 to UBNTs M series gear is like asking if you'd rather have dial up or fiber....     

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@bleger wrote:
On another note, we're using 3.65 ubnt gear also and I'm seeing a lot of self interference. In your in your opinion, should I scrap 365 ubnt and go with 2.4 cambium synced gear? Your throughput story is amazing and if I can get that type of thoughput with a better propagation than 365, we'd probably double our customers in no time.

Hi.  Well, in my experience - self-interference is THE biggest problem, and it's also (fortunately) a problem that we as WISPs have the best abililty to control. Competitive interference and 'environmental' interference typically isn't actually as large a problem usually (since the noise levels are usually lower than your self-interference signals) and in most cases, you can't really do to much about it anyway. So - Cambium's GPS sync technology has very wisely targetted A) the most important source of interference (which is self-interference) and targetted B) the interference that we can most effectively control (which is self-interference).  However - this post is about how well Cambium ePMP does deal with a noisy 2.4Ghz environment, and how effective it is performing in that noisy enviroment. 

I should also say, we do use some non-Cambium 3.x Ghz gear for backhauls, and when they have solid directional dishes, we've been OK with their results. However, in MultiPoint AP's, we're 2.4ghz and 5Ghz and 900Mhz (Canopy FSK) only.  And now that we've experienced what ePMP can accomplish, we are changing all our 2.4Ghz stuff over to Cambium ePMP (~2,000 CPEs).

Personally - I can't say enough about Cambium's 2.4Ghz performance in a noisy enviromment.  As I related earlier, the first place we deployed it was on the AP that I am connected to - since that is right in town and in about the harshest RF environment we expected to find. Our ''non-Cambium'' gear used to work OKish (we thought) a few years ago in this situation, but as the number of routers increased everywhere & as competitors deployed their 2.4gzh gear - the performance dropped so that at peak times, we would be lucky to get ~ 1 Mbit through it.

So, when we got Cambium gear in, I thought - this would be the perfect environment to test.  I frankly expected it to fall flat on it's face too. In this case, I could connect the AP to the existing sector, and I could connect the SM to my existing DualPol grid antenna.  It was the PERFECT environment to test the difference because nothing would change - same antennas, same mounts, same aiming, same channel - everything.

So, we got our sample gear in and I think it even took me a few weeks to get around to changing it out. I really throught it was a waste of time - 2.4Ghz is dead dead dead, right?  But I went and changed the AP and my SM out - 'just to see'... and to my shock and amazement... throughput went DRAMATICALLY UP.  I have my SM's ''QOS'' set to 10 Mbit download and 1Mbit upload - and the following screen shot shows the AP's perspective, and what I'm getting right now at the moment.

I've also included a ping sample on this image too.  That's another HUGE difference - way more stable ping times. This is pinging from my laptop, through my router, through my ePMP SM, ~4KM to the ePMP AP, and through our backhaul to our Internet Gateway. With our previous non-Cambium gear, which was non-GPS-Synced of course - the ping times "could" in theory potentially be lower. BUT in practicality, they were all over the place because that gear had such a difficult time dealing with the noisy environment. The 'non-Cambium' gear was 1-2ms at 3:30 AM if I wasn't using it for anything except testing my ping times, but it could be anywhere from 2ms to 200 ms during peak times, and certainly if I was trying to download something - the ping times would be 200-600ms when the connection was saturated (with 1 or 2 mBit of data).  Now I can put my full 10 Mbit QOS through it and the ping times are about the same as when it's sitting idle.

NOW - even Cambium is not magic and obviously there are going to be situations where it still struggles. Frankly, even at my place here, when I look at the packet % distribution, I can see it's having to do quite a bit of re-transmit and that there are dropped packets - so it's not like ePMP is immune to interference.  But Cambium's GPS Sync, it's Air Fairness TDMA, it's highly organized scheduler - they all add up to ePMP working where other's fear to tread.

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And one last message about the performance I see on my 2.4Ghz ePMP link. As mentioned previously, I normally have my QOS set to 10 Mbit down and 1 Mbit up and that's normally what I get.  However, I don't want anyone to think that ''I can ONLY get 10 Mbit through my connection''.  If I configure my QOS to '0' and just test the link, these are the  results I get.

This is ~57 Mbit download and ~18 Mbit upload - about 75 Mbit agregate throughput on a wireless link, in 2.4ghz through a smattering of trees, about 4 KM, and this is right over the center of town with dozens of routers in the way.


ToddC_Jun18_16_2.jpg

And this is what I got right now testing to speedtest.net - so 17ms and over 50 Mbit down and over 18 Mbit up - so about 68 Mbit aggregate from speedtest.net in the exact same enviromment that our previous 'non-Cambium' gear could barely maintain a 1 or 2 Mbit connection, and would often have 200-400-600ms ping, struggling to to communicate.

 ToddC_Jun18_16_3.jpg

That's what Cambium ePMP 2.4Ghz is capable of for me in a noisy tree infested environment.  Just think if there was an ePMP2000 with a beamforming antenna in 2.4Ghz....  ;)

OK - I now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

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Went ahead and bit the bullet for my first arrangement of Cambium gear. I ordered 4 90° Cambium 2.4 sector antennas, 4 ePMP1000 2.4 w/ sync radios, and 10 force200 SM's. We will be getting it all in next week, and I'm looking forward to getting my hands on them.

I wanted to go ahead and wrap one tower, hence the reason for order the 4 AP's, but we might have to break them up and use them on a couple different towers to fight some fires that we haven't be able to put out yet. Our 3.65 Ubiquiti gear has been nothing but problems, so we will transition some of our customers over to the ePMP 2.4 gear and see how that fares. Once I can prove the benefits of Cambium, I think it will be an easier sell for me to really start rolling in new equipment and getting rid of the UBNT 3.65 gear. Right now, its gonna hard pressed to do it since we have so much Ubiquiti equipment in house, and convicing them order something totally different. What do you guys that have switched from UBNT to Cambium do with all of your old equipment that you have pulled out of the field? It would be nice to have some kind of a buy back program so I can get some credit for turning in my Ubiquiti gear to buy more ePMP.

We run both ePMP and UBNT and have been slowly moving some sites over to ePMP in addition to building out a few new sites fresh with it.  When I recover UBNT radios during swaps they either get re-used elsewhere in the network if they are 5Ghz and fairly new or sent to the recycle pile.

There is little to no value in UBNT M-series gear at this point though I suppose you could try and sell it on ebay.

I have tried to switch 2.4 Ubnt over to EPMP, not having much luck so far. Really need a 10/15mhz channel size to to work with instead of 20/40


@jakkwb wrote:

I have tried to switch 2.4 Ubnt over to EPMP, not having much luck so far. Really need a 10/15mhz channel size to to work with instead of 20/40


Just use a 5ms frame size and you'll have access to 5/10/20/40MHz channel widths in TDD mode. There's not a huge difference in latency between 2.5 and 5ms.... and you also get about 10% more throughput with 5ms as a little bonus.

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Wow. I feel kinda stupid. How did I not know that? Must be the heat. Thanks Eric for enlightening me.

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Ok, so now that I have that fixed, here is my setup. I have a Ubnt Rocket M2 with the Ubnt sector with RF-Armor on it (channel 11). On a 10mhz channel size. I have 18 users on it, constantly complaining about slowness. I have an EPMP mounted about 5 ft above it, also on a Ubnt 2.4 sector with RF-Armor (channel 1).Both have same output power, same antenna gain, same distance setting, both aiming the same direction. Users are from 3 to 7 miles out.

Next week I start changing folks over. Cannot wait to decommision this Rocket.

Can someone share about what bandwidth I should be able to pass on a 10mhz channel size? I have my first Force 200 operating.