Yes!! on the 10MGz! We have been running AP's in the 10MGz range for a while. Wonderful alternative to 900. It is amazing how many you can run on a tower. I have had as many as 5 running without any issues of self-noise. Of course, I do have Sector Shields to help.
I would love to see more people post here so we can continue letting the Cambium Powers to be KNOW that there are a "Bucket Load" of EXISTING 2.4 AP's out there that are Prime for upgrades!
My experience so far with existing Cambium 2.4 Radios with Cambium Sectors has been LESS than I expected. I have been running MTik for about 8 years and MTik plows thru trees much better than Cambium.... just my experience. My customers are in North West Arkansas in the Boston Mountain Range. 55,000 acres of National Forest with the Rural and small towns scattered within that Forest Range. Very NON-forgiving on tree issues. There is no doubt that the channel filtering would work wonderful up here since the problem in Noise taking away the QOS of the signal. It will show a good signal level but the QOS (real throughput and packet loss) don't hold up.
I believe the big difference with say Cambium over MTik is you would change for the GPS sink. Well let’s look at that for a minute. On existing Cambium, I can NOT run 10MGz and still have GPS. OK…. If that’s the case then I stay with 20MGz if I want to run Cambium because, in my case anyway, running in OPEN Wi-Fi is NOT going to work. But with MTik at least I have their own Engineering which I can run NV2 which helps big time on syncing AP’s and SM/CPE. It’s not GPS but it kicks butt on open Wi-Fi. Without Channel Filtering on the Cambium 2.4, and running 20MGz, my experience is the noise in the 20MGz freq. is too much for the Radios to over-come.
Here is what I see myself doing going forward. I will deploy ‘some’ Cambium 2.4, limited to areas that are mostly noise free. These will be areas not crossing towns or larger sub-divisions, ECT. Then I will have MTik also running 10MGz to reach the N(Near)LOS customers and customers in high noise areas. I have found the 10MGz will resist 20MGHz noise well on its own. We put a lot of RD-24 Dishes for better gain and shield off noise VS panels and plastic type SM’s.
Then when (If) Cambium decides to make a butt load of money by applying their ‘channel filtering’ tech to the 2.4 band I will convert everything I can to Cambium.
Yes!! on the 10MGz! We have been running AP's in the 10MGz range for a while. Wonderful alternative to 900. It is amazing how many you can run on a tower. I have had as many as 5 running without any issues of self-noise. Of course, I do have Sector Shields to help.
I would love to see more people post here so we can continue letting the Cambium Powers to be KNOW that there are a "Bucket Load" of EXISTING 2.4 AP's out there that are Prime for upgrades! My experience so far with existing Cambium 2.4 Radios with Cambium Sectors has been LESS than I expected. I have been running MTik for about 8 years and MTik plows thru trees much better than Cambium.... just my experience.
My customers are in North West Arkansas in the Boston Mountain Range. 55,000 acres of National Forest with the Rural and small towns scattered within that Forest Range. Very NON-forgiving on tree issues. There is no doubt that the channel filtering would work wonderful up here since the problem in Noise taking away the QOS of the signal. It will show a good signal level but the QOS (real throughput and packet loss) don't hold up.
I believe the big difference with say Cambium over MTik is you would change for the GPS sink. Well let’s look at that for a minute. On existing Cambium, I can NOT run 10MGz and still have GPS. OK…. If that’s the case then I stay with 20MGz if I want to run Cambium because, in my case anyway, running in OPEN Wi-Fi is NOT going to work. But with MTik at least I have their own Engineering which I can run NV2 which helps big time on syncing AP’s and SM/CPE. It’s not GPS but it kicks butt on open Wi-Fi. Without Channel Filtering on the Cambium 2.4, and running 20MGz, my experience is the noise in the 20MGz freq. is too much for the Radios to over-come.
Here is what I see myself doing going forward. I will deploy ‘some’ Cambium 2.4, limited to areas that are mostly noise free. These will be areas not crossing towns or larger sub-divisions, ECT. Then I will have MTik also running 10MGz to reach the N(Near)LOS customers and customers in high noise areas. I have found the 10MGz will resist 20MGHz noise well on its own. We put a lot of RD-24 Dishes for better gain and shield off noise VS panels and plastic type SM’s.
Then when (If) Cambium decides to make a butt load of money by applying their ‘channel filtering’ tech to the 2.4 band I will convert everything I can to Cambium.
Sorry to be a party pooper, but we will not be buying any more 2.4GHz products. Period. The noise in the band, much like 900, make it worthless. The noise floor at the tower usually isn't so bad. It's the noise at the SM. From the customer's own router, to their neighbor's router, extra APs for large homes, security systems, etc. When the downlink SNR is 7dB, you're not gonna get much out of it.
Sharing experiences is what it is all about. Nothing about your reply surprises me or most likely anyone else on this forum. If you read one of my replies on this string you will see we only use it AWAY for towns and cities and try not to CROSS any subvisions or multiple homes. I would agree with NO Channel filtering any OPEN Freq. is going to have Noise issues. I think the MAIN push in this string is to let the Cambium powers to be know that if they are going to expect ANY long term sales of Wireless equipment they need to Engineer the CHANNEL FILTERING into their radios.
Sorry to be a party pooper, but we will not be buying any more 2.4GHz products. Period. The noise in the band, much like 900, make it worthless. The noise floor at the tower usually isn't so bad. It's the noise at the SM. From the customer's own router, to their neighbor's router, extra APs for large homes, security systems, etc. When the downlink SNR is 7dB, you're not gonna get much out of it.
These things could be mitigated greatly if Cambium did the following:
A) a way to run the Spectrum Analyzer on a customer's SM remotely. Right now, we have no way to tell what noise the client's radio is hearing
B) a way to do a 'eDetect' on the client which shows all WiFi devices, in all widths. Right now, we have no way to tell what devices are there.
@so, if for example we're in 2457 @ 10 Mhz, and the customer's router is 2457 @ 20 Mhz - eDetect will say there are no interferers... which of course there are.
SO - for me, most of the customer side 2.4 Ghz noise issues could be mitigated - or at least we could help the client solve them - if we could A) do a remote SA on their SM, and B) if we could do a remote ''Super eDetect''.
Remote spectrum analyzer and an eDetect that could see everything (which I have been asking for for awhile...) would certainly be helpful, but you can only fix those issues if the interferer is something that you (or the customer) has control over.... if it's a neighbors router and sixteen extra APs that are causing the issue you're pretty much out of luck.
The fact is, the band has gotten pretty well trashed... there's no way I'd even consider investing in something like PMP450 in 2.4ghz at this point, but if we can use Elevate to get a decent improvement out of what we already have out there, that's a whole different thing.
oh... and you can do GPS sync with 10mhz channel - as far as I know, the only thing you can't do with 10mhz channels that you can with 20mhz is use 2.5ms frames... which, in practice, pretty much just means you'll have a bit more latency.
Hmmmm.... did not think you could do 10MGz on ePMP1000 2.4 AP and GPS? I know on mine you can not. You have to take my unit OFF of TDD to even get the 10MGz option to show up?
Hmmmm.... did not think you could do 10MGz on ePMP1000 2.4 AP and GPS? I know on mine you can not. You have to take my unit OFF of TDD to even get the 10MGz option to show up?
5 MHz and 10 MHz are not available only with 2.5 ms frame size. With 5 ms frame size, 5 and 10 MHz are available and you can do GPS sync with them.
Mathew Howard wrote: The fact is, the band has gotten pretty well trashed...
For us, our previous (non-Cambium) gear had pretty much stopped working, but when we replaced hat with ePMP, the difference was dramatic. Case in point was my house - I kept the sector antenna at the AP the same (just changed the AP Radio) and at my house I kept the same antenna there - just changed the SM radio. The differnce was dramatic, it went from <1 mbit most of the time, to a full 10 Mbit (QOS limit) all of the time.
So yes, it is noisy - but it's also what ePMP is able to do in that noisy environment. It's not magic of course, but it sure feels like it is sometimes. :) I'd love to know what filtering on the AP (a 2.4 eMP2000) could do. :)
Its good to see all the feedback on this thread I am glad I started it.
We have actually considered investing in the 450 platform is 2.4. Its not the AP cost that keeps us away is that we are growning quickly and the SM cost would really increase our ROI. So we double deploy sometimes tripple. Each site gets 4 -90 degree 450i 900mhz
4 90 degree 2.4 ePMP
and sometimes 5ghz ePMP generally inside a KP dual antenna with the 2.4.
on the rare occasion we have los we install 5ghz.
But our preferered / go to platform for installs is 2.4 epmp and in the rural enviorment noise is not to bad. trees are a double edged sword. Hard to install but eat noise up.
Our equipment of last resort is 900 450i not because of noise we have learned how to use it but because of cost and the limits of the AP to move bandwidth. We try and keep the loads light.
I agree 2.4 and 900 are dead in many places but in places where 5ghz only deployments would mean death to a wisp as a business 2.4 and 900 are viable options.
We are target atleast 5 new towers a summer ( our build season) and a few micro pops so we are not huge but that is still 20+ 2.4 APs each year that we would go right to the 2000 platform. Add to that the upgrades at other tower locations and we would be purchasing a few.
That said I assume cambium looks at the global market and sees only 2.4 being used in the USA and Canada. I also assume they can see the sames numbers.
Still we can hope for something to come down the pipe in 2.4 some day. ePMP 1000 cant be the end of the road for cambium products and 2.4 long term I wouldnt think.
Yes thank you for that. Can't believe I had not run across that somewhere before. I just went on two AP's and changed them to 5ms and 10MGz and much better connections now. We try and put our low end customers only on the 2.4 for obvious reasons as I'm sure most everyone does. Thanks for stating that in this thread!
Cambium_Sri wrote: 5 MHz and 10 MHz are not available only with 2.5 ms frame size. With 5 ms frame size, 5 and 10 MHz are available and you can do GPS sync with them.
Actually, all channel widths used to be available in both frame sizes. So in older firmwares, you could choose 10 Mhz channel and 2.5 Mhz frame sizes, which is how I ran to the link at my home for quite a while.
Then, a new firmware came along (maybe about a year ago or so) and in there, the 2.5ms frame disappeared in 10 Mhz channel widths. I was told at that point that it would be added back in, but that each firmware revision it was 'extra work' essentially.
So - it is possible, it used to exist in ePMP. It's just that 5 & 10 Mhz channel widths are not 'native' so they need to be added in. It'd be great to have that added back in, once Elevate stops dominating all the development time.
Sorry but 5/10 MHz was never supported on 2.5 ms frame size. These channel bandwidths are not native to the chipset and work is needed to ensure timing is met in terms of performance, reliability and sync. If we had done this work and included it in a release it would take a lot of convincing and undoing of a significant amount of work to remove it. 2.5ms was introduced primarily for syncing PMP 100 legacy radios, which support only 20 MHz channels. This way operators who are/were using PMP100 in their network have a slightly easier upgrade/migration path to ePMP. ePMP Elevate is another migration tool and there is quite a bit of demand for it as a migration path.
We're also in the position where there just isn't a viable alternative to 2.4ghz in a lot of areas we cover, so we're kind of stuck with just making it work as good as we can. In some cases 900mhz is a good option, but it is expensive and there is limited spectrum, so we pretty much only use it where nothing else can work.
We put up a lot of towers with only 2.4ghz APs, because when we originally put them up, we didn't think there would be more than a couple customers that would have LOS, and we didn't feel it was worth putting up 5ghz APs - but as we have added 5ghz APs to those towers, we've found that we typically end up with a lot more customers working on 5ghz than we expected. This why I love Lite APs, we can throw a Lite AP with an omni on a tower for very little cost, so even if it only ends up ever getting 1 or 2 customers on it, it will pay itself off... and if it does end up with more than 10 customers on it, it's a simple upgrade.
Sorry to be a party pooper, but we will not be buying any more 2.4GHz products. Period. The noise in the band, much like 900, make it worthless. The noise floor at the tower usually isn't so bad. It's the noise at the SM. From the customer's own router, to their neighbor's router, extra APs for large homes, security systems, etc. When the downlink SNR is 7dB, you're not gonna get much out of it.
for us the customer side noise has been very manageable. we've replaced almost all of our ptp100 900mhz customers with epmp 2.4 with great overall results. I'll definitely agree that in town or busy areas 2.4 can be hard to use BUT in rural areas 2.4 has been a life saver for us. (epmp 2.4 that is)
for us the customer side noise has been very manageable. we've replaced almost all of our ptp100 900mhz customers with epmp 2.4 with great overall results. I'll definitely agree that in town or busy areas 2.4 can be hard to use BUT in rural areas 2.4 has been a life saver for us. (epmp 2.4 that is)
2/3s of our customers are connected to epmp 2.4
We too have had pretty good results with ePMP 2.4, rural North and South Carolina. It helped to establish a routine where the installers are supposed to note the channel in use to the tower, and either advise the customer or explicitly log into the customer's router and lock it to a clean channel. (or at least not the same one the SM is using) I'd love to try out an ePMP2000 variant of the 2.4ghz AP, but honestly I think when we see crippling interference on 2.4 it's 80%+ of the time at the SM end, not the AP end.
Our problem at this point is finding gear to update the hundreds of customers we still have NLOS on PMP100 900MHz gear with 17dB yagis. Owner so far is unwilling to commit to updating it all to PMP450 900MHz, but he's coming around. (but he still insists on sticking with the Cambium dual-pol 900MHz Yagi, which is only 12dB, refusing to pay almost twice as much for the KPP 17.5dB dual-pol 900 yagis - considering that more than half of our existing PMP100 900MHz customers are already on 17dB single-pol yagis that seems doomed to fail) Many of the customers who were able to connect via 12dB in 900MHz band are already migrated to 2.4 and 3.65 bands.
Cambium_Sri wrote: Sorry but 5/10 MHz was never supported on 2.5 ms frame size. These channel bandwidths are not native to the chipset and work is needed to ensure timing is met in terms of performance, reliability and sync
I want to say ''are you sure?'' - but I'm sure you must be sure. :) I was certain that I used to run 2.5ms frames and 10 Mhz channels when the shorter frames first came out, and that it went away after the next firmware update. BUT, you would be the guy who would know - so I must be mistaken. I'll have to check back in my email history to refresh my memory about what I'm referring too.
Can you share some more on your experience with moving / migrating from the PMP100 900Mhz to the ePMP 2.4GHz platform. We're looking into this as well. The PMP100 900Mhz serves us really well for those clients which were really difficult shots.
Once we had a good signal on the 900Mhz around -77dBm (-79dBM was borderline) or so, the customer stayed connected and at least we were able to maintain the customer account. We had 2.4GHz using regular 802.11B equipment before, but if the CPE wasn't within 1.5-2miles from the tower and had reasonable visibility (LOS) to the AP tower, we didn't use it. And we only did the 2.4GHz before getting Canopy PMP100 900MHz system.
Using LinkPLanner seems to show possible good results. We've used LinkPLANNER for all of our 5GHz ePMP installs and the numbers on paper tend to be real close to the real world deployment. This is giving us some confidence that if this holds true for the ePMP 2.4GHz platform as well, then we really can start to look at deploying the ePMP 2.4GHz as part of our NLOS and nLOS installations. Resulting in retaining and gaining more clients.
We would buy ePMP 2000 in 2.4GHz. We have UBNT and ePMP1000 in 2.4GHz running 10MHz channels. Would love to have 2000 with dynamic filters and beam forming.