This started on 3/23/21. The 450M AP in question is less that 6 months old. Ordered brand new and paid thousands for 450M AP with medusa MU-MIMO. After brief delayed delivery, we received AP with only SU-MIMO and no MU-MIMO capability. Had to fight with vendor and cambium to get a license to upgrade when 450M should have arrived from cambium already licensed for medusa MU-MIMO. AP has never really worked well.
Fast forward to 3/23/21. AP begun locking up losing connectivity from radio and ethernet. Only way to regain access and operation is to power cycle using the CMM5 controller and injector. Once repowered it works again for about an hour at most before recurrence. No other 450M or 450i or 450 AP on the controller is locking up. The injector is powered by redundant 600W cambium power supplies with no power issues. Change sync on affected 450M AP from autosync+free run to autosync to generate sync. Neither option helped. The issue continues.
Now this is what pisses us off. We generated support ticket. Cambium is dragging their feet on the ticket and not generating an RMA so we can get this thing working again. While they drag their feet on the issue our competitor using Ubiquiti is not having issues and are taking our customers as they need to be online for remote work, school and other reasons. We have lost several customers so far and counting. Maybe we should consider cheaper and what seems to be more reliable Ubiquiti (at least out of the box). We have been using cambium since 2003 canopy days and only use the cambium platform. Hopefully cambium is paying attention here and will get this resolved today. Though, not holding our breath as at this pace our business will die faster from Cambium’s inaction and sloth-like response than if inflicted with covid.
We run firmware 20.0.1 but have downgraded to 16.2.3.1 with no resolution. Problem remains. All APs are on private network and not accessible via the internet. We sent cambium field_diags and engineering. All they have to say is the ethernet is locking up. Ok. We know that, we already told you that in the support ticket. Now you know. So, the question is what are doing to address the situation and make it right before we lose all our customers? If the AP was old and off warranty this would be understandable but at 6 months there should be no excuses.
Update: Give credit where credit is due.
After posting Cambium called and promise to RMA a new unit to us immediately. We will update the post once received.
Update: Replacement AP 450m arrived quickly. Installed on tower 72 hours ago. Subscribers auto registered within minutes. Big relief as this took the extra load off the other unit. So far no lock ups. All seems well. Will continue adding more load as is necessary. See some statistics below.
Thank you Cambium
This is an update. The refurbished replacement died. Pretty crappy customer service for expensive new equipment. New equipment bought 12/04/20. Installed 01/21. Immediately had issues. Cambium added Medusa key some time around 02/21 which should have been added to unit at factory was not (cambium mistake). 03/21 Unit failed. Replaced shortly after with refurbished RMA unit. Why refurbished for a new equipment defective from day one? Ask Cambium?
07/21/21 RMA Unit failed. How much longer will this type of equipment failure continue for such expensive equipment?
What does support say? I’ve never had a dead 450m yet, knock on wood.
Absolute silence. Nothing as yet. Unbelieveable but it is true. Let’s look at one possible potential outcome. We will lose our subscribers to Ubiquiti competitor then there will be no more need for APs, SMs, Routers, Controllers, Injectors, Power supplies and all the other pieces we purchase to support the system. Another possibility is to simply build future sites and extensions with Ubiquiti or other brand.
Please send me your support ticket number… this does not sound good, and I would like the opportunity to investigate please. Send to: matt@cambiumnetworks.com.
Hi Matt. Thanks for reaching out. After much prodding and power recycling our efforts got the unit up this morning. We have no idea how well it will stand up but are waiting for the next failure. Fortunately, for us we have redundancy built into our system such that the clients automatically failed over to the backup AP. Since our rescan time is 4+ days we are manually moving a few back as a test for a few days. The ticket # is 271367.
Needless to say, we love Canopy/Cambium equipment. Hence, we have only used Canopy/Cambium for the past 18+ years. The main point is having invested so much in this Cambium 450M AP that never worked right from day one (see previous reports), and totally failed 3 months in, the replacement AP should have been brand new; not refurbished equipment and maybe we would not have this issue now. But here we are, the replacement acting up 4 months after installation. From purchase date till now is only 7+ months. Each tower climb costs us big time. Every downtime is a potential loss to other non-cambium wireless competitors and the big fiber/cable names and a hit on our reputation. We get it, equipment fails. QA and customer service should have made certain the unit was replaced with a brand new unit to avoid issues as these. If the equipment was older and out of warranty it would be understandable. But this had issues from day one and then replaced 3 months later with refurbished item. Now 4 months later refurbished is acting up. Customer service needs to do better. Technical support needs to act immediately on cases of unordinary circumstance as this. Keep in mind, all other AP (450m, 450i, 450) on the same CMM5 injector, CMM5 controller, power supplies, and sync are having zero issues.
Not trying to downplay but I’m going to assume you ran a fluke certify on the cat5e heading up the tower.
Did you also run fibre to it? Sounds weird how it’s just “back up”
Cambium contacted us and are correcting the situation. Cable good. Fluke tested 30ft shireen 2021 between AP and controller.
Update 08/05/21:
It’s been 9 days since hearing from Cambium with what I thought was encouraging support regarding the issue. Have not heard from them since. Nonetheless, the AP continues to fail. It has not stayed active or accessible long enough to be useful. Each time it rains the AP simply dies until another restart from the controller.
Hi Guys. Waited a while to update this post as we wanted to be sure all is working well.
Update:
Shortly after 8/5/21 post (above) the new (and I mean new) 450M arrived. We installed on tower around 8/10/21. Since then all metrics have been met. The system is stable even during severe and extended thunderstorms it continues performing. We limit subscriber distance to 7 miles & use a mix of 450, 450i, 450b, & 450b retro SM. We have removed all 430 from our network and are currently removing 450 & 450d sm for 450b high gain, 450b retro and 450i sm. We offer 20/3, 30/7.5, 50/10 & 100/20Mb/s service packages. QoS is a must on our network.
Most of our customers reliably run VoIP phones & streaming services. Since Cambium stepped up and eventually did right by us we are reciprocating the goodwill and have ordered additional 450m APs and TX2020r-p for additional deployments. TX2020r-p will save cabinet space, consolidate, simplify CMM4 & CMM5 equipment at our tower sites.
That’s it folks. Happy TG.
Glad to hear this, and thank you for the follow up post. Cambium always stands behind its products and will always endeavor to provide the best support possible.