Any plans to make the almost 5 year old AC SA not so useless?

So about 5 years of AC with no WiFi survey and a broken, unreliable SA.

Super cool concept ! Hoped 4.6.1 would help, it didn’t. So super cool concept is currently super slow, super inaccurate, super buggy, super worthless…

Super slow: been running on a micropop for 20 hours now, still hasn’t found the other cambium AP on the same pole 4ft away or most of the WiFi routers that show up on the top graph but not on the bottom (not even as unknown) . It’s like this on allllll the AC radios.

Super Inaccurate: Just like the rest of this horrible interface the information is a crap shoot… it may be accurate it may not be. Repeatedly the SA will show massive interference, and by massive I mean -2 dBm or a non-neg number even and it doesn’t go gray, it stays there for hours and it can’t be right or not a single subscriber could connect but fine… it shows a channel that’s -85dBm on the noise graph so you move there . OH now all of a sudden that -2 dBm you was on is a slightly more reasonable -44 dBm (still would have made most connections impossible) and the spot you moved to, the spot that for hours the SA said had nothing in it but -85 dBm of background noise , NOW the SA is like “OMG there’s something here at -65 dBm ! I just found it ! after hours of scanning I didn’t see until you tried to use this channel !” That’s with subscriber module mode OFF…

Even with “Subscriber Module Mode” turned on it often doesn’t find its own subscribers even after days of running.

Super Buggy: You have leave it running for hours in order to have any hope of gathering useful information only to have it lose everything and start over for no obvious reason. Or just hangs, stops scanning. Like just now, as I write this I have the SA up on an AP on another monitor, it’s been collecting data for about 20 hours and BOOm suddenly, just now, all the data blanks out and it has started over…

Junk…

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I’ll say the same thing I said 7 years ago… they need a “WiFi site survey”, just like any $25 radio has. It’s basically impossible to do basic diagnostics when a client calls in with a problem. A decade ago - we could tell then guy in 60 seconds “the problem is your router, named ‘SMITHFARM’ on channel 2457. Change the channel to 2412 and things will work better”.

Now it takes 3 hours and we don’t know if the info is even half accurate or not. And then it crashes and we need to restart another 3 hour SA session.

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Yep, this.

I’ve never understood why the SA/site survey thing has been so low on the ePMP priority list. I can’t speculate on the simplicity of implementing it, but if all other vendors can, I bet Cambium can as well.

It’s such a basic and useful thing - it would add tremendous value to the ePMP product line.

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Yeah, SA/SS on Cambium is definitely a weak point…They’ve got the second radio for godsakes… It just needs some programming.

I’m not even dreaming of something like Ubiquiti’s AirMagic that collects interference data from SMs and blows you out a nice chart to give you some hint which channel is best for not one, but all/most SMs…

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I think Cambium has plans for their ‘Dynamic Frequency Selection’ to do something like that, but

  1. They don’t yet have a simple ‘WiFi Site Survey’ working
  2. They will probably try to tie that feature to another licensing scheme (or tie it to cnMaestroX) and try to sell it to us for extra money again.

Even on a PTP link, we can’t even see the SA of both sides of the link at the same time on the same interface.

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I’m not even dreaming of something like Ubiquiti’s AirMagic

Meanwhile ePMP can’t even do the basics… I really like the concept of the SA/SS on the AC ePMP but it’s really little more than vaporware in it’s current state… More of a concept demo than an actual working SA/SS.

I had to log into one of our 5xHD links for the first time in a long time a couple if nights ago and it’s just crazy how snappy fast the interface loads/responds given how much useful information they have on the dashboard. I mean, it’s a little cartoony/cluttered until you get use to it but you rarely have to leave that page because everything you want to know in a hurry is right there FOR BOTH ENDS OF THE LINK ! While ePMP displays the bare minimum and still does it slowly, poorly and inaccurately.

The instant I logged into the 5xHD BOOM link signal was in the toilet (turned out a crew installing fiber on the pole managed to knock the dish out of alignment) and the dashboard (which, again, displays BOTH ENDS OF THE LINK!) was even suggesting better channels !

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Yep - sadly true. I’ve been asking for everything to be on a dashboard for so long, I’ve given up. Why we need to tunnel 2 layers deep onto 4 different screens, to see 1 piece of info on each page?

I mean - I know Cambium would be hesitant to simply replicate the UBNT interface, but guys… UBNT basically has figured out what we need to see & where we need to see it, and sadly - Cambium doesn’t.

I mean, on a PTP link with Cambium, we basically need to ‘trial and error’ different channels, and then test, and look at the performance specs - and WRITE DOWN the results… or to run a SA on both sides for an hour or two or three, and then bring then what… PRINT THEM OUT so that we can compare them side by side? Or open two browsers and try to stack them? So that what - so we can trial-and-error another channel and do that back and forth for hours to try to find the best channel. And no - ACS might pick and OK channel for the AP side, but the SLAVE side might be on a totally non-operational channel. AND AND, each channel change totally disrupts the link, while with the other guys, they can chance channels seamlessly without dropping the link. AND we can do it almost all from the one main screen, with all the info in one pane-of-glass.

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Because the interface is a rickety 5 story building made out of trash and covered with nice blue and white vinyl siding on a foundation of plastic pallets on a landfill built on a sinkhole in a swamp. They have to put everything layers deep so they can spread how slow it is across several taps vs having you just setting there cursing under your breath while you wait for the main page to load like it use to be when the bandwidth (for just one interface !) graph was on the main page.

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:rofl:

20 character bs

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Customer with connection issues that has several wifi and other wireless devices… would be really cool if I just quickly log into that customer’s radio thinking it’s probably some local interference and maybe we can get this resolved while I have him on the phone !

Been running SA for 30 minutes now… it still hasn’t even found it’s own AP which it sees at -56 or any of the customers wifi routers or even the other 2 AP’s it can see on the tower (Though it might have seen one as you can see but 30 minutes later it still can’t figure out what it is)…

5+ years and this is what they have done with that extra radio:

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It’d be really cool if one of the things that second radio did was go into simple, plain jane WiFi mode… and in 10 seconds, it could give us a WiFi site survey of all the wireless routers and other WiFi devices it could hear. It’d be SO helpful to be able to tell the customer (while they are still on the phone) that their interference problem was their router.

Hi Frank… OK, I did a quick wireless scan, and I see that you have a DLink router named “FranksFarm” and it’s on channel 5750 Mhz, and that’s interfering with our antenna on your roof. So if you change the channel on your DLink router, then that should fix up all your problems"

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Exactly. Had a another customer recently that complained his firestick stuff suddenly started buffering constantly. What should have been a <5 minute phone call where I log into his F300-16 and say “Well Frank , you have something calling itself VIZEOCONNECT-12103, which I assume is your TV , and something called TP-LINK_F233, which I assume is your WiFi router both running on the same channel. Since your Firestick is probably a lot closer to your TV than it is your WiFi router that is your problem”

But instead, after waiting on this worthless SS/SA to find nothing useful for an hour I had to drive to the customer’s house so I could pull out my phone and run Ubiquiti WiFiMan to instantly reveal what his problem was.

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