I saw the PMP 450m demo with cnMedusa and that's impressive: about 500Mbps on a single AP without using crazy channels like 80MHz...
PMP 450 is a great platform, but when we'll see these improvements in ePMP product line?
Cambium_AndyW said:
Lots of exciting development going on across the full range of products at Cambium. To find out more details about what is happening on a specific product line try posting a Topic on their forum.
So... Is there anything you from Cambium can tell us about the future? :-D
So first off, there's nothing else like the 450m on the planet... even LTE doesn't support massive MU-MIMO. It was only because Cambium designed the 450 platform from the ground up using FPGA's that they were able to do this. That being said, 802.11ac wave 2 does support MU-MIMO features, and Cambium has already announced that they're planning an 802.11ac upgrade path for ePMP. Now that wave 2 compatible chips and designs are becoming more mature, I wouldn't be surprised to see Cambium integrate wave 2 features into the next generation of ePMP AP's.
I would like to know if Force 180 802.11n SMs will be able to use these improvements or not...
It would be crazy to replace all SMs or to lower down AP capacity only because using 802.11n SMs...
Sakid has already mentioned in early posts that all ePMP SM's will be compatible with the next generation of ePMP radios. That being said, overall sector capacity will be reduced when using 802.11n SM's, most notably from the lack of 256QAM. I would expect that MU-MIMO features will still work with legacy SM's because this is an AP feature, and this is currently how off the shelf wave 2 WiFi AP's work.
As Eric explained MU-MIMO is an AP ability, n clients can connect and work just fine. You’ll still have the MU-MIMO gain, but at N rates. Qam256 codes about 20% better, so let’s say the AP can do 500 Mbps in 4*4 Mimo at 40mhz, if you fill it with N clients, you’ll be down to 400 meg. It’s not an extreme penalty. Aside from that qam256 needs better snr than qam64, so you’ll need to keep that in mind about your future installation. Usually 4 to 5 DB better snr.