Recently Cambium Networks customer did a test on the field comparing Force300 and Mimosa C5C in Turkey. Mimosa link was already running for a long time on many locations across the city and the performance was suffering so we asked for ePMP to be tested as well as PTP550 in the same environment.
My observation on why is Mimosa popular in WISP community?
Because of Frequency range 4900-6400 MHz, and even they could go to 4.6 GHz - 6.4 GHz so basically WISPs think it's amazing to escape 5 GHz interference and perform.
Bad news is
- those bands are illegal to use so the future is not bright
- interference in those bands is almost like in 5 GHz, so no real advantage on the long run
Cambium Networks ePMP Force300
- Doesn't need to escape from 5 GHz. ePMP actually solves problems in 5 GHz and performance is super good. Great radios, filters, overall hardware, software, antenna...
Setup
Spectrum
- 5 GHz looks really bad
- Mimosa was able to do tests in 4.6 GHz - 5.0 GHz but ePMP can go lowest to 4.9 GHz so we agreed to test in that band which was the cleanest we could find, however still challenging
Test 1 - results are in Mbps
- 80 MHz channel size on 4930 MHz
- One link is off, another vendor is testing and then switch
- Tested with auto modulation settings, and then with TDD split
- Multiple tests done in each setup, results always the same
Test 2 - results are in Mbps
- 40 MHz channel size on 4930 MHz
- One link is off, another vendor is testing and then switch
- Tested with auto modulation settings, and then with TDD split
- Multiple tests done in each setup, results always the same
Conclusion
- Mimosa probably has some bug with TDD split so we could take into account auto modulation
- ePMP Force300 demonstrated superior performance in high interfering environment in multiple tests
- Mimosa marketing message for C5C as industry-leading price performance doesn't really fit in noisy environment. And how many environments are interference free?
- ePMP demonstrated that it doesn't have to escape 5 GHz to perform