Too bad Cambium chose to make a link between a PTP550 and a Force300 incompatible. They are both AC radios, they obviously could be compatible (in single radio mode)… but they decided to thwart us on that too.
If they hadn’t done that, then upgrading (or swapping, or an emergency backup) between a PTP550 and a Force300 or a ePMP3000L would be a simple swap. ONE CREW could swap ONE END of a link at a time to upgrade a Force300 into a PTP550 link. But no…
Now there is an idea!
Yes both radios are 802.11AC based but the e3kL/csm is closer to a wifi radio than the ptp550. The 550 also uses much better hardware to run the software. But it should be possible to let them link at a slower encoding rate with maybe a software key based on replacement radio mac address? (Gotta give them a reason to allow this, right?)
It’s flat out - a fatal flaw. If WISPs knew that they could put up a Force300csm link - and that down the road when they outgrew them, they could send ONE crew (or even ONE person) to ONE side of the link, with a PTP550 programmed in the same configuration, and we could upgrade these links with only a couple minutes downtime… that’d be a huge selling feature. The way it is, we either need to have two crews at the same time… or what we would typically do is to do a complete overbuild. Well - what an unnecessary amount of work. PLUS, guess what… if we’re going to overbuild the Force300 link to an upgraded link anyway, then our choice of radios is wide open. We can put AF5xHD or Mimosa or whatever we want, if we’re going to take a couple days and overbuild. BUT - if we could just program up a new 550 Slave with the same settings as the Force300c Slave… and just change power supply, and swap the antenna connectors… that’d be a huge simplification on upgrading links. It’d be a good reason to a) choose Force300’s as a starter backhaul, and b) to choose PTP550’s as the next upgrade.
One of a couple fatal flaws with the PTP550
The other main one is the inability to change, tweak, modify, test one radio pair, without totally disrupting the other. That’s insane on a dual-radio system. Can’t adjust ANYTHING in the slightest, without totally dropping the whole link on both radios. WISPs absolutely need to be able to ‘uncouple’ the radios, and then we should be able to test/tweat Radio2 until we have found the best channel, the best settings (which as we know, can take a LOT of tweaking to get it perfect) and then when we’re 100% sure we like the results, we should be able to shuttle the data over to the Radio2 pair, and then proceed with tweaking Radio1s the same way – without destroying the whole link for several minutes at a time on ever iteration. THEN, once we are happy - bond the radios.
Anyway – I’m totally hijacking this thread now. Sorry sorry.
If two of us hijack a thread then its more like new ownership. The mods will split it off if its important to separate them.
I completely agree! Dual transceiver radios should be decoupled in all but the data switch prior to the transceiver paths. Making a change on one should not affect the other. Even better, place a data path router that runs an IGP like IS-IS or OSPF to balance and ensure path data distribution.
On links that we must absolutely up, we build two links and route over both. Since we use cisco gear, we setup a pair of ip sla trackers for the link and use them to modify the route path metric in our IGP. Doing this makes the ptp550 less attractive economically as two epmp3000L links is the same bandwidth, split radio paths and we can tweak one without killing the other besides being cheaper. We also plan multiple backhaul connections per tower so that no matter what happens the tower stays online until the batteries deplete.
But I still agree with your complaints.
Seems like it’s worthy of its own topic 
So under consideration?
I have no idea, I just thought the suggestion was stand-alone enough that it was worth splitting from the previous discussion. I have absolutely no insights on the ePMP development plan, sorry.
that was more of a suggestion to help put it forward if you could.