Now that Federated has completely convinced me they have no business being a SAS provider - What are other’s experiences regarding changing SAS providers? @CambiumMatt in another post stated that the first thing to do is to open a ticket with support and that it is not an entirely painless process, but it has to be less painless than the regular outages Federated has.
For those that have switched in a live environment, is this something that can be taken care of in a relatively short scheduled maintenance window if planned appropriately? Any serious gotchas?
As I have mentioned, the best way to go is to open a support case with our team via https://support.cambiumnetworks.com, and we will set up a call to discuss the process and make sure that the expectations are set for the move.
The move itself is normally done over a 2 day window with minimal disruption to your clients, and the Cambium Support team will do the bulk of the work to make the transition as smooth and painless as possible.
Cambium will always do our best to support customers through any issues that might arise with the SAS or CBRS in general.
I just completed a transition yesterday, but I moved from Google to Federated. The process above is pretty much the process. I had a meeting setup with Cambium support that explained the process and they double checked our cnMaestro that there wasn’t any outstanding issues on our CBRS deployment before scheduling a time to begin the transition. I will note we use cnMaestro cloud and needed to give them access for the transition. Early morning we met in Teams meeting and I watched them perform the break from Google. Next day early morning, another Team meeting and watched them connect to Federated. The process didn’t take more than an hour each day. The time may very depending on the size of your deployment.
Thanks for the play-by-play @Fld_Wrls , that is very helpful. I’m also curious, why did you switch from Google to Federated? What issues did you have with Google’s SAS implementation?
The support from Google is very lacking. We had issues for 3 days where we’d see suspensions that would last 2 to 4 hours and Google support was of little to no help. Perhaps its designed so you’re only suppose to go through Cambium support for issues, but having that extra step feels like we’re wasting more time in getting the problem resolved. After the third day they finally acknowledged that backend system changes were being tested but didn’t realize it was affecting live service. Prior to all the issues, its worked fine with an occasional CPE registration being stuck and I had to manually go in and remove from system so cnMaestro could re-register the unit.
Unfortunately for me, I transitioned at the worse time, but the level of contact and support is a difference between night and day. Time will tell if the transition was a mistake, but at least I know if I do need to switch back, Cambium makes it pretty easy to do so.
I’m glad switching SAS providers is made fairly simple by Cambium. Federated has proved (to me) to be incapable of providing service reliable enough to meet my standards, so I’m starting the process.
We converted from Google to Federated and support is much better with Federated, but the outages we experienced (three in past month) are making me want to go back.
I can’t say I ever had an outage while on Google due to their system going down. Most outages I had were related to P-DPA’s. I think that is one reason why I stuck with them since the beginning was that it just worked. But getting any assistance from them is painful.
That’s a tricky conundrum. It feels to me like Federated will figure out and solve their technical problems - but feels like Google won’t ever solve their customer support choices…
I feel like we’re all on a two lane highway, and when issues happen with one lane, people switch to the other because they think it will be better… but then traffic starts piling up on the new lane, but clears up on the other lane, so then people want to move back.
In response to @Fld_Wrls recent issues with Google Support.
The Cambium Operations and Support teams are working with Google to help improve the level of service
Google has requested that Cambium Support open a ticket with Google Support on behalf of the customer, so that the customer will receive Cambium’s higher level of support.
It will also allow the Cambium Support team to monitor the current cases opened with the Google support team and provide guidance where required.
We moved from Google to Federated back in October of 2022 and I will say that it has been a lot better experience than the daily DPA suspensions we were getting with Google. Every time we would try opening a ticket with Google they would just send us an automated message about why and what DPA suspensions are and could never speak with a live person.
Since being on Federated, we have had a few issues over the past month or so, which has been frustrating, but it is nice that they actually address the issues that they are having and will send out notification while the problems are occurring to let you know that they are working on a fix.
For switching SAS providers, it was very easy to do and Cambium did most of the work while our team watched to make sure all customers were back up and operating.
