@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