I’m requesting a feature enhancement to enable the ePMP radios to perform a “full” wireless link capacity test. At present, the ePMP2K/3K radios (that are configured with RADIUS) are limited to the RADIUS provisioned MIR for each customer’s SM link. This presents a problem for Q/A and field troubleshooting purposes as the operator has no visibility of the maximum link capacity for ePMP customers in their network. The PMP450 AP/SMs have no such Link Capacity Test MIR restriction. The ePMP firmware must be enhanced to provide this critical metric (Wireless Link Capacity) for operators to properly manage their network.
I’ll provide two use cases below to justify the importance of this feature enhancement to the ePMP software engineering team. Please implement this extremely important feature in the soonest available FW release.
(1) Customer Rate Plan Upgrade Validations:
This use case would be if an existing customer, with a 5/1 Mbps rate plan, is requesting an upgrade; how would the operator know whether this customer is capable of a 25M/3M (or greater) rate plan? At present, the operator must first provision the new rate plan and then run a link test to validate the customer’s available link capacity. This type of validation is results in a wasteful use of the operator’s employee resources. Especially so if the customer’s link is unable to support the increased rate plan. Unfortunately, the lack of visibility into the ePMP SM’s max link capacity can often result in the customer being mistakenly over-provisioned with a rate plan that exceed the SM’s actual link capacity. Such oversubscription problems can result in customer dissatisfaction for all customers in that sector.
(2) Field Service Q/A & Troubleshooting Over-Subscription issues
When troubleshooting service delivery problems, the link efficiency (Actual Capacity/Theoretical Max Capacity) is vitally important to identifying potential oversubscription problems. Since the DL/UL MCS metrics can often vary wildly, it’s extremely important to identify that all customers have sufficient link capacity (or link efficiency) to effectively deliver the subscribed customer rate plans in that sector. Showing that the customer merely meet their provisioned MIR provides very little confidence to the effective oversubscription and actual capacity of that AP sector.