ePMP 3000 Series

I’m curious to find out what everyone’s overall opinion with the ePMP 3000 series? How’s your performance and stability? Does it meet your expectations? How does it compare to other vendors you have used? How does compare to other Cambium PtMP gear? Or anything else you want to add. Thanks!

We think the gear is great.

We think that some of Cambium’s business decisions made by the “sales department” are questionable or even downright bizarre - but or us, the ePMP3000 & 3000L AP’s have been great, and the Force300 lineup (we mostly use 25’s and 16’s) are fantastic. Performance and stability - are great.

Not a fan of 3000L but that’s because 2000 is better in almost every way (sync over power, edge filters, 48v). The 3000L can’t do MU and it doesn’t handle near-band interference well. So other than a little more bandwidth the 3000L is inferior to 2000 (or 2000L for that matter). I suppose it’s better than 2000 for PTP but due to it’s lack of sync over power and all the problems we had with its internal GPS we do not use them even for PTP.

I like the 3000 but it’s not “WOW” just “Meh”. It’s good enough that when we build out new or split old 2000 sectors we do it with 3000 when possible. However the fact that the only antenna choices you have with 3000 are 70’ish° (that claims to be 90°), 60° very low gain horn or 360° Omni makes that pretty difficult to do sometimes. No clue why there are no 120° horns/sectors for 3000 given that you would think that would be exactly were MU would shine.

We do have a couple of 3000 sectors now with all AC client radios and they do handle a good deal more clients/traffic than the 2000’s do. So if you are rolling out with all AC client radios the 3000 can be a lot better than the 2000 (the 3000L can’t do MU so it still sucks no matter what you do)

We use the 3000L and 300csm for ptp without issues as long as you use the new gps antenna, not the old ones.
The lack of sync over power is a bummer but not a complete show stopper. Good performance on a 40mhz channel and despite some reports they actually are fairly good for noise rejection, nothing like the 2000’s or the ptp550 but still enough that we have one plowing through a competitor’s UBNT link with no problems in performance or stability.

Thanks for the input. I guess I need to go back and try to figure out why I have so many problems with this gear in particular. We have the exact opposite experience in most cases. I don’t want to get into equipment bashing, hence why I am asking in the manner I did.

Ok well I don’t know what kind of problems you are having but I will add that all things 5Ghz are getting harder and more frustrating every day. The amount of 5Ghz interference out there has just exploded in the last few years (at least in all the places we operate). Combine that with the fact that while every gen of 802.11 moves more data at the same time their ranges decrease and they are less tolerant of interference (of which there is more and more of). So it’s getting really ugly out there (at least around here). In fact I’m not sure that 5Ghz isn’t worse now that 2.4Ghz ever was.

Of course all this interference makes having a good SA / SS even more important and ePMP has just completely dropped the ball on that with a buggy, insanely slow, and outright broken SA / SS.

Oh and the 4.x firmware for AC has been an absolute train wreck after train wreck making an already hard job even harder.

Again, no idea what kind of problems you are having but 5Ghz it isn’t as easy as it use to be and it’s getting harder every day.

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Ya, I agree with this. We do have a very high noise floor in my area. I absolutely expect some performance issues. I just expected at some point performance in higher noise environments on the 3000 series would improve, maybe it will eventually. I guess we’ll see.