epmp upgrade to 450?

Products ePMP
#1

Okay, so I have good success with the epmp gear so far, really just upgrading old UBNT links which fall on their face when you load them up. But now I'm wondering why someone would go up to 450's?

I don't mean really that 450's are not good, but it seems that you wouldn't get more aggregate throughput, and with modern speed packages, it wouldn't matter if you could put more subs because the sector aggregate bandwidth wouldn't support it anyway, no?

I've admired 450's for awhile, but I just want to know how it works financially, or how others are making it work from a financial aspect when the gear is so much more capital, but customers are only willing to pay so much, and right now that niche is being largly filled with epmp. Why upgrade? What am I missing?

#2

Personally, I'm under the impression that the deliberately slow down ePMP improvement to not affect PMP450 sales.

By sector, with MU-MIMO (not so massive for now since the don't seem to be able to take advantage of all the possibilities of the 450m), ePMP AC with standard MU-MIMO could probably have similar performance than current 450m performance and from a marketing aspect, you can have your low end line to have similar performence to your high end gear.

If Cambium was alone on the market, that would make sence. ePMP can compet with Ubnt AC gear, yes. Not sur about MImosa but I will probably give those gear a try. The support GPS sync + AC + MU-MIMO, Cambium should do the same.

Anyway, true market challenger is not Ubnt or Mimosa but FTTx . Why invest 4 X 5000$ AP + hundred of 500$ SM (>70 000$) when I can pass fiber through a whole town for the same price (or maybe even less) ? Yeah, PMP450m is great but no body care about that when you can pass fiber for the same price or have a 50$ radios that not great but work . ePMP line make sense, PMP450 ? Not sure.

ePMP line was welcome because of great feature for the price, Cambium should focus on this line, ePMP AC with 8x8:8 + beam forming + beam steering. Around 1000$ by AP, just like current 2000 AP with beam forming, 100$ SM and maybe 30$ for the customer router. Like I already write on this forum, I was relly desapointed with ePMP 2000 annoncement and for now, continue to invest on fiber instead of wireless. 

#3

In a perfect world 450i should get you a bit more aggregate throughput per AP and 450m should get you a whole lot more.  That said, this gear is never deployed in that sort of environment.

I've been wanting to play with 450 for a while now but like you, the cost/benefit analysis just doesn't add up.  We can hang another cluster of ePMP in a neighborhood and do a micro-pop that is fiber fed for about the same price as a single 450i AP and pump out considerably more bandwidth.  The pricing per CPE/bandwidth of 450 is also a deal breaker.  It's such an antiquated approach.

I'm totally with Mike99 on this:

@Mike99 wrote:

Personally, I'm under the impression that the deliberately slow down ePMP improvement to not affect PMP450 sales.

#4

Hello, jus wanted to share some facts that I learned throu the years of using cambium, for long time since they were Motorola...

ePMP works great, for residential, small business if you dont have to deal with much interference...

PMP450i, well thats big boys gear, they will give you reliable links were others wont, they will give you more throuput in hi interference enviroments.

thats what you use when you have to deliver reliable links  in hi interference enviroments.

#5

450  VS EPMP     i'm not sure if that has been laid out yet, but here is a good spot to do it.  

EPMP under the hood is extremely tweaked wifi chipset.   and holly crap have they tweaked it and made it made lead into gold in my opinion.

epmp increases in latency as you add subs.   its stable, and slow increase, but still increases.    it gets more through put in a 5ms frame, resulting in its higher latency.    the  450 uses a shorter frame, 2.5 MS resulting in lower latency.   the MAC is build from the ground up around this and has no loss in performance while runing 2.5 ms frames, the epmp looses about 10% overall throughput.  

so    450, 5 to 7 ms latency,    is about double to start, but grows. the 450 doesn't change unless it is pushing its frame utilization. 

scheduler,  the 450 has definable time slots in the uplink downlink ratio so you can optimize your entire schedule based on your network needs. as much as 90% downlink.   the epmp has the 3 common to pick from.  

the EPMP is limited to 120 subs. the 450 is almost double.  (238 VC)

the EPMP has to be marked front or back in a re-use situation.    if a 3rd AP is heard, it will interfere with its like marked AP.    

450 can hear any number of like channel APs, as long as CIR is in line, you will not have uplink or downlink trouble. 

so the 450 allows for even denser AP concentration over the EPMP.  

as an example.    the 900 mhz band only has three channels to use.   at our peak we had about 70 APs active.    in three channels...   all APS LOS to each other, 6 aps per tower and towers only a few miles apart.    more than a dozen APs in each channel able to hear each other.    that simply isn't possible with EPMP.    you can get good density with EPMP with good channel planning, good antennas, and proper sector tilt. but you'll never get the same density from EPMP as you can with 450.

the 450 has lower modulation state requirements than the EPMP.   it also has a few more under the hood tricks to deal with noise.  

the 450 can code to qam 256 making it 25% faster IF all CPES are coding in that rate.      

the 450 can do QinQ vlaning.  the EPMP can pass that data, but can't strip both tags. just the outter most. 

the 450 is an older system the epmp and operators can use the 450m to go up to 400 meg now in the same 20 mhz channel space they are using, cambium has announced they are going to push that evelope even further, expecting to reach past 1gig in that AP. assuming they can get separate data streams in a 14 mimo Transmitters at qam 256, you looking at a top speed of 875 Mbps aggregate in a 20mhz channel in the future.   and 1.7gb in a 40 mhz channel also future (those tops speeds are my personal speculation. cambiums current official top speed in 400 meg with exccess of 1gb future capacity without saying the channel size needed)  

the 450 is completely software definable leaving the sky as the limit.   the EPMP isn't as flexible, but still flexible. 

 the 450 treats each VC as separate end point.    voice VC are prioritized by the VC and the data rates are definable to the different VC queues,   the EPMP reads QoS at layer 2 in the Ethernet frame, while is can still dependably deliver voice, or video content ahead of regular data, the 450 goes one step further to prioritize in the MAC layer itself. 

the 450 supports a much wider range of frequency bands.     ALL 5ghz, 3ghz 2.4 and 900 ghz.    epmp is 5 and 2 only. 

for providers in dense environments, the 450, as a system can be many times faster than even the EPMP.     in moderate density, or low desnity situations, the performance perks for the 450 isn't as apparent. 

the 450 gui isn't much different than its gui from more than a decade ago. and its simple and wonderful.     I wish the EPMP had its gui. 

if you point a spectrum analyser at a 450 AP you'll see a cleaner radiation pattern then the EPMP.    

for us the epmp has been solid and reliable,   but hasn't been in the field as long as the 450 or the PMP 100 series.  we've got 10 year old radios still working just fine.    

as a wisp, we are mostly epmp now.   we've got a lot of the old 100 and 320 series and will be adding 450 900 to our line up.    the future speed improvements will be nice on the EPMP but the 450 is arguably the very best wireless edge access platform out there. 

4 Likes
#6
@Mike99 wrote:

Personally, I'm under the impression that the deliberately slow down ePMP improvement to not affect PMP450 sales.

By sector, with MU-MIMO (not so massive for now since the don't seem to be able to take advantage of all the possibilities of the 450m), ePMP AC with standard MU-MIMO could probably have similar performance than current 450m performance and from a marketing aspect, you can have your low end line to have similar performence to your high end gear.

If Cambium was alone on the market, that would make sence. ePMP can compet with Ubnt AC gear, yes. Not sur about MImosa but I will probably give those gear a try. The support GPS sync + AC + MU-MIMO, Cambium should do the same.

Anyway, true market challenger is not Ubnt or Mimosa but FTTx . Why invest 4 X 5000$ AP + hundred of 500$ SM (>70 000$) when I can pass fiber through a whole town for the same price (or maybe even less) ? Yeah, PMP450m is great but no body care about that when you can pass fiber for the same price or have a 50$ radios that not great but work . ePMP line make sense, PMP450 ? Not sure.

ePMP line was welcome because of great feature for the price, Cambium should focus on this line, ePMP AC with 8x8:8 + beam forming + beam steering. Around 1000$ by AP, just like current 2000 AP with beam forming, 100$ SM and maybe 30$ for the customer router. Like I already write on this forum, I was relly desapointed with ePMP 2000 annoncement and for now, continue to invest on fiber instead of wireless. 

Taking all that is ePMP today and overlaying with AC based MU-MIMO, non contiguous channels etc is the plan we are working on. Its a challenging task as we will need to once again optimize something designed for pure indoor operation in an outdoor environment but we are up for the challange :)

1 Like
#7
@Chris_Bay wrote:

450  VS EPMP     i'm not sure if that has been laid out yet, but here is a good spot to do it.  

EPMP under the hood is extremely tweaked wifi chipset.   and holly crap have they tweaked it and made it made lead into gold in my opinion.

epmp increases in latency as you add subs.   its stable, and slow increase, but still increases.    it gets more through put in a 5ms frame, resulting in its higher latency.    the  450 uses a shorter frame, 2.5 MS resulting in lower latency.   the MAC is build from the ground up around this and has no loss in performance while runing 2.5 ms frames, the epmp looses about 10% overall throughput.  

so    450, 5 to 7 ms latency,    is about double to start, but grows. the 450 doesn't change unless it is pushing its frame utilization. 

scheduler,  the 450 has definable time slots in the uplink downlink ratio so you can optimize your entire schedule based on your network needs. as much as 90% downlink.   the epmp has the 3 common to pick from.  

the EPMP is limited to 120 subs. the 450 is almost double.  (238 VC)

the EPMP has to be marked front or back in a re-use situation.    if a 3rd AP is heard, it will interfere with its like marked AP.    

450 can hear any number of like channel APs, as long as CIR is in line, you will not have uplink or downlink trouble. 

so the 450 allows for even denser AP concentration over the EPMP.  

as an example.    the 900 mhz band only has three channels to use.   at our peak we had about 70 APs active.    in three channels...   all APS LOS to each other, 6 aps per tower and towers only a few miles apart.    more than a dozen APs in each channel able to hear each other.    that simply isn't possible with EPMP.    you can get good density with EPMP with good channel planning, good antennas, and proper sector tilt. but you'll never get the same density from EPMP as you can with 450.

the 450 has lower modulation state requirements than the EPMP.   it also has a few more under the hood tricks to deal with noise.  

the 450 can code to qam 256 making it 25% faster IF all CPES are coding in that rate.      

the 450 can do QinQ vlaning.  the EPMP can pass that data, but can't strip both tags. just the outter most. 

the 450 is an older system the epmp and operators can use the 450m to go up to 400 meg now in the same 20 mhz channel space they are using, cambium has announced they are going to push that evelope even further, expecting to reach past 1gig in that AP. assuming they can get separate data streams in a 14 mimo Transmitters at qam 256, you looking at a top speed of 875 Mbps aggregate in a 20mhz channel in the future.   and 1.7gb in a 40 mhz channel also future (those tops speeds are my personal speculation. cambiums current official top speed in 400 meg with exccess of 1gb future capacity without saying the channel size needed)  

the 450 is completely software definable leaving the sky as the limit.   the EPMP isn't as flexible, but still flexible. 

 the 450 treats each VC as separate end point.    voice VC are prioritized by the VC and the data rates are definable to the different VC queues,   the EPMP reads QoS at layer 2 in the Ethernet frame, while is can still dependably deliver voice, or video content ahead of regular data, the 450 goes one step further to prioritize in the MAC layer itself. 

the 450 supports a much wider range of frequency bands.     ALL 5ghz, 3ghz 2.4 and 900 ghz.    epmp is 5 and 2 only. 

for providers in dense environments, the 450, as a system can be many times faster than even the EPMP.     in moderate density, or low desnity situations, the performance perks for the 450 isn't as apparent. 

the 450 gui isn't much different than its gui from more than a decade ago. and its simple and wonderful.     I wish the EPMP had its gui. 

if you point a spectrum analyser at a 450 AP you'll see a cleaner radiation pattern then the EPMP.    

for us the epmp has been solid and reliable,   but hasn't been in the field as long as the 450 or the PMP 100 series.  we've got 10 year old radios still working just fine.    

as a wisp, we are mostly epmp now.   we've got a lot of the old 100 and 320 series and will be adding 450 900 to our line up.    the future speed improvements will be nice on the EPMP but the 450 is arguably the very best wireless edge access platform out there. 

Chris,

As always, great summary. There are definitely differences between 450 and ePMP and they have everything to do with density and latency+tput. There is one major trick on the ePMP side that we have not executed on and that is the concept of contention window similar to the 450. This, combined with a basic polling could significantly improve the latency situation as you add more and more subscribers. We looked at most the deployment density of ePMP and decided it is best to do this around 11AC as opposed to adding as a feature on ePMP1000. 

Sakid

1 Like
#8

So I guess if I really had some dense pockets of subs there is some advantage, but OTOH, until the <450_whatever_gen_next> comes out, the aggregate throughput is still a limitation. So in our environment for right now, we get 80% of what we want out of the epmp, and we look for the corner cases to try other gear?

It will be interesting to see how this new gear really works. If the throughput really is much better and you get the other advantages, then it might pencil, but aren't the subs still made of gold?

I keep hearing warm fuzzy things from Mimosa, but I'm pretty skeptical still. Our ePMP gear has been rock solid with only a few hiccups, a huge upgrade from our old UBNT gear, which falls on its face when you load it up. Mimosa is promising sunshine and rainbows to all, but I'm really not convinced you get overall performance, that seems like it's harder to do. Don't know.

Is there any plausibility in picking up some 320 gear, i.e. if I wanted to go with something a little more flexible and robust than the epmp for some corner cases, or is it just too old and limited?

#9
@silverstr8p wrote:

So I guess if I really had some dense pockets there is some advantage, but OTOH, until the <450_whatever_gen_next> comes out, the aggregate throughput is still a limitation. So in our environment for right now, we get 80% of what we want out of the epmp, and we look for the corner cases to try other gear?

450m, which at release, will triple aggregate throughput at the sector, has been announced and will be shipping a little later in the year. After release, there's a raft of various updates to further increase capacity of the 450m, north of 1gbps. The 450m AP is fully backwards compatible with pmp450 SM's, so no truck rolls. In addition, the new 14.2 beta firmware (it's in RC phase right now), allows for 30MHz channel widths, which will provide even greater aggregate throughput for existing PMP450 AP's.

The 450 platform is the 'Cadillac' of radios from Cambium, and if you need to operate on 3.65, or 900MHz, it's your only option available from Cambium. There will be no 3.XGHz, or 900MHz flavors of ePMP in the future.

@silverstr8p wrote:

It will be interesting to see how this new gear really works. If the throughput really is much better and you get the other advantages, then it might pencil, but aren't the subs still made of gold?

If you strategically order SM's, and use the license system to your advantage (buy only licenses that your customers will need, and only upgrade when they purchase more BW), and buy in bulk and negotiate a pricing exception with your Cambium sales rep... it might not be as expesnive as you'd think. There are considerable discounts that can be had if you work closely with a Cambium rep on a large purchase. Lastly, the 450 series is designed to last and be supported well into the future. We've bought close to a thousand 450 SM's, and out of all of those, we've had less then a handful that have either been bad out of box, or that died in the field and had to be RMA'd. It's extrememly rare to have one die, even after YEARS of use, and being used a multiple customer locations.

@silverstr8p wrote:

I keep hearing warm fuzzy things from Mimosa, but I'm pretty skeptical still. Our ePMP gear has been rock solid with only a few hiccups, a huge upgrade from our old UBNT gear, which falls on its face when you load it up. Mimosa is promising sunshine and rainbows to all, but I'm really not convinced you get overall performance, that seems like it's harder to do. Don't know.

Mimosa, Ubiquiti, etc. have promised that they'll get PtMP GPS-sync, and frequeny reuse working... someday... and to their credit they've had some success getting these to work in a point to point mode... but getting it to work in a PtMP setting is far more difficult, and I think that's why it's been about a half decade now and UBNT hasn't figured it out. Mimosa has had delay after delay in releasing their PtMP TDD GPS sync firmware. These two companies, espeically UBNT, have millions and millions of dollars at their disposal for R&D and have spent years working on this, and yet... PtMP GPS sync still eludes them. In addition, there are a plethora of other vendors that are using WiFi based chipsets that have not been able to provide PtMP TDD GPS... as far as I know, Cambium's ePMP is the only WiFI-based system on the market with actual working sync.

@silverstr8p wrote:

Is there any plausibility in picking up some 320 gear, i.e. if I wanted to go with something a little more flexible and robust than the epmp for some corner cases, or is it just too old and limited?

DO NOT BUY any PMP320 gear. It's WiMAX based, it's totally EOL'd, it's a dead end. If you're interested in deploying on 3.XGHz, use PMP450... it has a robust roadmap including 450m support, and support for upcoming CBRS changes for the 3.XGHz FCC market.

1 Like
#10
@Eric Ozrelic wrote:
450m, which at release, will triple aggregate throughput at the sector, has been announced and will be shipping a little later in the year. After release, there's a raft of various updates to further increase capacity of the 450m, north of 1gbps

i wonder if it will really happen. I've hearing for some years about "magically" high throughput numbers, usually coming "real soon now". But when you dig, it requires 80M channels, perfect modulation, zero interference, amazing signal strength, blah, blah, blah. And the promise of giant buckets of bandwidth going down the 20M channels which exist in the real world seem precariously rare. I hope it happens, but not holding my breath. If this new tech gets me a least part of the way there though, I'll be dropping my rep a line and getting a few cases of them to roll out in some areas.

#11
@silverstr8p wrote:
i wonder if it will really happen. I've hearing for some years about "magically" high throughput numbers, usually coming "real soon now". But when you dig, it requires 80M channels, perfect modulation, zero interference, amazing signal strength, blah, blah, blah. And the promise of giant buckets of bandwidth going down the 20M channels which exist in the real world seem precariously rare. I hope it happens, but not holding my breath. If this new tech gets me a least part of the way there though, I'll be dropping my rep a line and getting a few cases of them to roll out in some areas.

The PMP450m on release will support an aggregate capacity of 400mbps out of the gate using a 20MHz channel width, and again, as mentioned, there's a very robust roadmap to take that to over 1gbps with FREE firmware updates. You should check out this video here with Cambium's Matt Mangriotis going over the 450m and the roadmap. This is the power of massive, multi-user mimo aka cnMedusa technology that no other radio manufacturer has engineered or has announced any development of. The only thing that comes close is 8TX8RX LTE, which costs 10's of thousands of dollars more then 450m.

One of the things that Cambium has consistently focused on is squeezing more bandwidth out of smaller channel widths, and providing more advanced interference mitigation techniques... whereas other vendors, like Ubiquiti and Mimosa seem to have gone the opposite direction... quoting throughput that requires massive channel widths and clients that are very very close (1 mile or less) from the AP.

1 Like
#12

Chris,

As always, great summary. There are definitely differences between 450 and ePMP and they have everything to do with density and latency+tput. There is one major trick on the ePMP side that we have not executed on and that is the concept of contention window similar to the 450. This, combined with a basic polling could significantly improve the latency situation as you add more and more subscribers. We looked at most the deployment density of ePMP and decided it is best to do this around 11AC as opposed to adding as a feature on ePMP1000. 

Sakid

Thats great to hear!

#13
@silverstr8p wrote:
@Eric Ozrelic wrote:
450m, which at release, will triple aggregate throughput at the sector, has been announced and will be shipping a little later in the year. After release, there's a raft of various updates to further increase capacity of the 450m, north of 1gbps

i wonder if it will really happen. I've hearing for some years about "magically" high throughput numbers, usually coming "real soon now". But when you dig, it requires 80M channels, perfect modulation, zero interference, amazing signal strength, blah, blah, blah. And the promise of giant buckets of bandwidth going down the 20M channels which exist in the real world seem precariously rare. I hope it happens, but not holding my breath. If this new tech gets me a least part of the way there though, I'll be dropping my rep a line and getting a few cases of them to roll out in some areas.

big bandwidth down 20mhz channels isn't anything new. infact you've probably got a device that can do it in your pocket... its known as a 4g LTE smart phone.  

cambium doesn't announce vaporware that is never delivered.   We've been a cambium customer for close to a decade, the best my memory can serve me, I don't recall cambium ever significantly missing a promised delivery time frame.   the 450 (original) isn't anything new. its actually rather old.   the 450M can deliver 400 meg now, over 20mhz channels (to those same old 450 cpes thats been in the field for 4 years) but before you begin to be overly skeptical and say a platform can't deliver what you want, why don't you take a moment and understand how it goes about doing it.  and remember, these are not promises from the wifi guys...  the 450 uses MU-MIMO, not all that differently from what is in LTE.   it was released when it was promised, the 450i was released when promised, the EPMP was released when promised.  the 650 and 700 series backhauls were announced and delivered as promised.     cambium has a track record of delivering on time, and speed as advertised.  frankly, something to many manufactures fall short on. 

next thing, you can use cambiums link planner to input all of your variables.  provided you've input them correctly, and inaccurately, you will get an accurate forecast of performance.   i've used it to forecast (feels like) thousands of links, i've yet to be let down provided i've done my job correctly. 

1 Like
#14
@Mike99 wrote:

Personally, I'm under the impression that the deliberately slow down ePMP improvement to not affect PMP450 sales.

By sector, with MU-MIMO (not so massive for now since the don't seem to be able to take advantage of all the possibilities of the 450m), ePMP AC with standard MU-MIMO could probably have similar performance than current 450m performance and from a marketing aspect, you can have your low end line to have similar performence to your high end gear.

If Cambium was alone on the market, that would make sence. ePMP can compet with Ubnt AC gear, yes. Not sur about MImosa but I will probably give those gear a try. The support GPS sync + AC + MU-MIMO, Cambium should do the same.

Anyway, true market challenger is not Ubnt or Mimosa but FTTx . Why invest 4 X 5000$ AP + hundred of 500$ SM (>70 000$) when I can pass fiber through a whole town for the same price (or maybe even less) ? Yeah, PMP450m is great but no body care about that when you can pass fiber for the same price or have a 50$ radios that not great but work . ePMP line make sense, PMP450 ? Not sure.

ePMP line was welcome because of great feature for the price, Cambium should focus on this line, ePMP AC with 8x8:8 + beam forming + beam steering. Around 1000$ by AP, just like current 2000 AP with beam forming, 100$ SM and maybe 30$ for the customer router. Like I already write on this forum, I was relly desapointed with ePMP 2000 annoncement and for now, continue to invest on fiber instead of wireless. 

70,000 for fiber?  I will buy that right now, sign me up.  we've prices 3 miles runs and much higher cost.     FTTx.  passive, frankly isn't to impressive when you fully understand the technology limititations.  802.1AH is pretty cool conecpt, but unless your serving a compact area, its riddled with limitations.   the 20KM reach limitation for example.  lets say you take that line into a 1:32 break near your switch,  you have 500meters from your break to hit your end points...  that fiber just got reallllly short.   next, your bus rate is shared equially. I'd like more than 33 MBPS per sub.   but again, if your after 30 meg a sub, its great.   active FTTx is much much faster, but your talking much higher prices.  and 70k isn't going to get you far at all. 

#15

I just looked on one site and the subs are in the $600+ range, which means your first income dollar from a typical customers nowadays who want to pay between $40-$70 would be >9 months, nevermind labor, AP amortization and all the rest, so figure close to a year in real dollars. Am I missing something? ePMP subs mean profit in around 3 months, including install costs, etc. So how does the math work for this customer on a 450i? Scaling that system with this math means you lose a lot of money very quickly, until a year from now? You may start making money after a year, but in a year some new tech comes out, or you're betting the bank it won't. I guess you could make it work closer to $200-250 for a sub, but that's a long ways to go for sub price discount. I'm still interested in the quality, but unless my numbers are flawed, the capital is tricky.

#16
@silverstr8p wrote:

I just looked on one site and the subs are in the $600+ range, which means your first income dollar from a typical customers nowadays who want to pay between $40-$70 would be >9 months, nevermind labor, AP amortization and all the rest, so figure close to a year in real dollars. Am I missing something? ePMP subs mean profit in around 3 months, including install costs, etc. So how does the math work for this customer on a 450i? Scaling that system with this math means you lose a lot of money very quickly, until a year from now? You may start making money after a year, but in a year some new tech comes out, or you're betting the bank it won't. I guess you could make it work closer to $200-250 for a sub, but that's a long ways to go for sub price discount. I'm still interested in the quality, but unless my numbers are flawed, the capital is tricky.

http://store.wirelessunits.com/cambium-450/

they start at 200$  WITHOUT volume discounts, depending on your licences you want, they go up to  $400 in 5ghz.  again, without volume discount.  

the EPMP integrated CPES are $99 MSRP... we pay a good deal less than that with our volume discount. 

the cost of installation is the same reason the cable, phone and TV companies lock people in 2 and 3 year contracts. and many of them still charge a pretty penny for installation. 

if you plan on doing a free install, than yes, it takes a while to make money.  the 450 is the top dog CPE. installed correctly, you can expect to see 95% or better of your CPES have a long field life.  atleast 95% of our now almost decade old PMP 100 CPES are still alive and well.  

as far as the 450 going away in a year,   its already 4 years old.   it just got another major speed improvement.  its a platform that is still growing, still improving, and cambium has a roadmap to keep doing just that.   is there any other system on the market, that can carry as much information as the 450m can in a 20mhz wide channel?  aside from LTE, NO.  they are still pushing that envelope. and will contiue to do so.  

has any other vendor developed major speed improvements to its 4 year old radio system? 

has any other vendor said you can take your 4 year old CPEs and leave them alone, but install this 1 part and get 4x the speed?     the 450 isnt restricted to the limitations to the chipset it is running on, its a full SDR, like LTE, and like LTE will contiue to evolve and develop into a faster system over time. 

Like any real carry grade product, your going to pay a steep capex with the expectation of a small opex.      platforms like the 450, LTE, wimax CMTS systems (cable) , DSLAMS (DSL) , FTTx (fiber) are not ment for a profit now and hope for the best 6 months from now, like a lot of wifi platforms. they are build to last, and built to make you money for the next decade.     the goal of all of these systems are reliable, sold delivery until they need to be replaced to reach the next generation of speed, not because it died without reason. 

the EPMP was developed to be that middle product, to deliver the speed we need at a much lower price, without giving up quality. the 450 is here for when you need more than the  EPMP. 

in short, if you need to pull a small load, use a small truck. if you've got 20 tons to move... get the big one. 

1 Like
#17

Okay, makes more sense, as long as our primary supplier can do something for us on the sub price, and presumably the license keys to unlock these. I understand paying for quality, but I do have to make it pay.

As I said, I've been eyeing thiese units for awhile, and if I can make it pencil we may start rolling out an AP and throwing up some subs in a tough environment in part of our coverage and see how they do. Now I have to figure out how their GPS sync works relative to the ePMP AP's we have. I have to guess we need a separate GPS sync source?

#18

This whole pay-to-play licensing model on the CPE is what caused me to write off Cambium until recently and I still think the approach is dated.  I get it (to a point) with the AP licensing but the nickel and diming on throughput, mounting options, etc, etc, etc, for the PMP line CPEs annoys me to no end.

We've really enjoyed the performance, reliability, and consistency of ePMP but the economics don't make much sense for us to even bother with PMP stuff (as much as I really want to).

Setup an account with a good vendor as others have stated and you will see way better pricing, then you can decide if it makes sense for you.

#19

l'm really interested into the financial aspect. 

Do you will buy a $1k Cpe for a residential or even business customer to sell a 30$ internet profile? 

I just can't imagine what could happen if a customer sign contract and after only 6 months  they leave city for example. And I couldn't imagine what could happen if you can't reget your 1k CPE. It's simply not a joke. 

I believe simply that 450i, 450m is mainly trageted to incumbent really big operator with thousand of customers, while ePMP is targeted to small WISP. 

But the small WISP must be fight with incumbent big players that could offer FTTc or FTTH for only 30$/month profile with 100Mbps in down and 30Mbps in up. 

I think Cambium should give even to the small Wisp a key to win (or only fight) with big players. 

I could admit ePMP is simply Lots better than Mikrotik or UBNT gears, but it even too bit for small Wisp. If I could install a 4 sector 450i ap for 4$k it could be the best thing we have to figt but then the problem will be the population of sectors due to CPE costs

#20

Yeah, I'm still rolling out epmp because it's an easy financial equation, I still don't really know about the drawbacks and/or nickel-and-dime aspects of the 450's, sounds like you pay for every little thing, so it's hard to really know what  you'll pay for an average customer. Usually that means someone somewhere is figuring out how to extract more money from you. I don't mind paying for value, but stuff like that is annoying. It sounds like the distributors have a lot of wiggle room, so it'll be interesting to find out from them what my real cost is. Still, it makes it hard to estimate what you'll pay for a full deployment of 450.