We're a WISP in Missouri with a few hundred customers, primarily Ubiquiti 5.8ghz. We've largely been happy with the 5.8 performance, and will probably stick to Ubiquiti for that band. However, we just acquired a neighboring ISP (owner health problems meant they needed a new home) who is primarily 2.4 Ghz UBNT (a mix of Rocket M2, Bullet, AirGrid, NanoBridge and NanoStation devices - mostly on omnis). The Ubiquiti 2.4 performance leaves a lot to be desired, so we're just getting our feet wet in Cambium-land.
To test things out, we purchased an ePMP-1000 Sync (the vendor gave us a 10-pack of Elevate licenses with the purchase). One UBNT omni in particular has been giving us problems, so we picked it as our testbed.
- The Omni in question had 26 customers, and struggled to pull 14 mbit/s between all of them. The majority of customers are on 5/1 plans, with a couple on 10/3 (who've never seen anything approaching that speed).
- We put up a second omni on the same pole (I know this isn't ideal, but there are some physical constraints) with the ePMP as the AP. We put the two at opposite ends of the 2.4 Ghz spectrum band to try and avoid interference. (The plan is to remove the first omni once we're happy with the new one)
- I used the Elevator tool, built an sm.json config, and successfully elevated the first 8 customers. The conversion has been trouble-free so far, with everyone connecting right up.
- Many reported RSSIs have improved, and the "wireless link test" shows speeds ranging from 75/7 (NanoBridge/NanoStation) to 25/5 (AirGrid). With MIR enabled, most of the customers are now showing traffic equal to the plan for which they are paying - so we're very happy there.
- We onboarded with cnMaestro (the cloud version). Not a bad system, will definitely take some getting used to.
If this works out, we'll be converting another 13 towers (and about 140 customers in total). Anyway, we did run into a few problems with which we could use help:
- We don't seem to be able to change passwords. Going to Configuration -> System, and changing the Administrator Account password pops up the option to save, but after save/reboot the password is once again "admin". It's not a huge problem (we have a separate management VLAN, and there's no way to get to it from the outside world) - but we'd really like to not have everything on a default password.
- We tried to use bridge mode, with a data VLAN (94). This would mirror the UBNT setup, which bridges LAN0 with WLAN0.94. When we do this, the bridge table under Monitor -> Network is empty. It's also empty when connecting via SSH. We'd really like to be able to replicate this setup (to avoid NATing the customer's router, which also NATs). [When we do bridge mode without the data VLAN, it shows clients; am I misunderstanding the VLAN role here? I thought it was a VLAN on the wireless side, untagged on the LAN port]
- When connecting via SSH (attempting to see if the bridge table showed anything there), the UI reports Parse error in /etc/busybox.conf, line 2: user. It repeats the error when a command is entered, but does show the command result. It doesn't look like it wants to give me a proper *NIX shell, so I'm not sure what the busybox.conf file says.
If anyone can offer some advice on the password change, I'd appreciate it. Bridge mode is a nicety (we can live without it), but I'd definitely prefer to get it going also if possible.