Comparing EPMP 2.4ghz AP with Ubnt prism 2.4 AP

Going to be setting up a new site soon. Would like your input on the above radios.

Will initially start with one sector/one radio.

Hello jakkwb,

There are some postings in the forum about experiences with ePMP 2.4GHz radios (for example http://community.cambiumnetworks.com/t5/ePMP-2000-and-1000/ePMP-2-4Ghz-Performance/td-p/56574/page/2). Not sure if they are specifically comparing its performance with the UBNT Prism 2.4GHz product, but some feedback regardless.

Regards

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We have a little bit of experience with the prism 2.4 AP... we had a Rocket M2 connected to an omni server around 10 clients. We upgraded all the M series clients to 6.X and tried to use mixed mode to upgrade the AP to the new prism AC. This really didn't work well at all and we ended up pulling it out and just swapping completely over to ePMP. Full disclosure, this is when it first came out and the firmware was really rough and I think other people were reporting issues too. Maybe UBNT has made progress in stabilizing the prism AC 2.4 firmware. ALSO, just up until recently there were no native AC 2.4 clients, which, at the time we did this hamstrung our conversion.

We've had excellent luck at very noisy sites using ePMP on 2.4 and GPS sync, and back to back frequency reuse. The software and hardware are very mature at this point. Our competitors have given up on using 2.4 at larger sites and we've jumped on this opportunity by using ePMP on them. We've also migrated a lot of legacy PMP100 on 2.4 over to ePMP on 2.4 because you can use the same GPS timing on them.

The only downside to ePMP 2.4 is that other then firmware development, there are no plans to introduce any new 2.4 hardware. Cambium would have to develop a custom AC chip for the 2.4 band (like what UBNT did) and I don't think that there's enough demand to suport further hardware development. I think a lot of operators see the 2.4 spectrum as junk band. We use it, but typically we'll put lower end clients on it, or use it as a last resort.

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