Equipment Suggestions

I run small WISP using Motorola Canopy 900Mhz integrated AP/CPE and Ubiquiti M2 Rockets.  Both of these vendors have been solid choices for the reasons I got them originally, but they are becoming dated.  The reason I went this direction was: A. to allow connectivity through trees (900Mhz aka NLOS) and B. Update my older Lucent Orinoco AP's.   "wireless hype" is one of the worst enemy of a small WISP so I was wondering what sort of equipment suggestions people here in the forum might have.  I would prefer to stay tower based I always hated the idea of repeating through multiple customers because if a relationship went south with customer A I didn't want to have customers B, C, D and E pay the price, but maybe this isn't an option.  I would prefer to say with a Cambium/Ubiquiti as they are solid companies and I don't think they will be failing any time soon.  I had that problem a lot with early equipment, vendor A goes out of business, vendor B gets bought by vendor C and changes their equipment, so on and so forth.  I would like to get something in a licensed frequency as there is just a ton of noise in 2.4Ghz and even 900Mhz these days but I have no clue where to start (the FCC's website isn't the most obvious or user friendly).  I like what I've read about Telrad but they are a smaller company and I would hate to invest in a ton of equipment and infrastructure only to have them go out of business.  It would be great if Cambium/Ubiquiti would come up with some sort of LTEish product.  It seems like Ubiquiti is steering their company toward the enterprise AP market and away from the WISP market.  I'm new to the forum so I didn't see a particularly general area for posting questions.

--Mike

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Hi Mike

I am sure that many WISPs on this community will help you. If you would like someone from Cambium to call you, just let me know. ray.savich@cambiumnetworks.com 

Ray

Hey Mike, welcome to the Cambium forums!

Have you tried out Cambium's latest 900MHz offering, PMP450i? While it's not a drop in replacement for you legacy Canopy 900mhz radios, it is capable of GPS sync and frequency reuse with the older radios... which can make transitioning a bit easier.

As far as your Ubiquiti M2 radios... Cambium's really close to having ePMP Elevate available for these radios. I believe there's a public beta available. Check out Cambium's page for Elevate HERE.

As far as licensed spectrum is concerned. That's going to be quite difficult at the moment, at least until CBRS for 3.5-3.7GHz is finally available. You can find out more information about CBRS HERE.

As far as other licensed spectrum for WISP's... there's not a lot of out there. You might be able to find some 2.5GHz/EBS spectrum, but it's still pretty rare, and the only equipment available for that band is LTE. TVWS is dead from what I've seen. There seems to be a lot of pushing in the millimeter wave space... more and more 24 and 60GHz products coming out... but this only helps for short LOS hops, mostly in urban areas as a fiber alternative.

Ubiquiti is working on an 'LTE-ish' product called "LTU"... it was announced at WISPAPALOOZA 2016, details are still pretty fuzzy, but it's Ubiquiti's next-gen PtMP platform. Supposedly it will NOT be compatible with any prior Ubqiuiti radios.... so you'll need to forklift your network to use it.

As far as Cambium and LTE... I can't say... but I can say that LTE is the hot new thing in the WISP space and it wouldn't surprise me if we saw a Cambium LTE product in the future. Cambium typically doesn't talk about new products until they're pretty far along in the development cycle. I think they do this to prevent releasing vaporware products and getting clients expectations up (e.g. the PMP450/Canopy FSK dual radio/backwards compatibility debacle that happened when PMP450 was first released).

Keep in mind though that LTE has a much higher learning curve then anything you've used in the Cambium/Ubiuqiti space. I'd highly recommend you read up and ask as many questions in various LTE forums as possible before you buy equipment. I'd also do a try and buy... and def get consulting support along with the deal. LTE is not for the causal do-it-yourself WISP operator.

In any case, you came to the right place... we have a great community here... I'm sure some of the other regulars will chime in here as well and give you their two cents :-)

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@Netcare wrote:

I run small WISP using Motorola Canopy 900Mhz integrated AP/CPE and Ubiquiti M2 Rockets.  Both of these vendors have been solid choices for the reasons I got them originally, but they are becoming dated.  The reason I went this direction was: A. to allow connectivity through trees (900Mhz aka NLOS) and B. Update my older Lucent Orinoco AP's.   "wireless hype" is one of the worst enemy of a small WISP so I was wondering what sort of equipment suggestions people here in the forum might have.  I would prefer to stay tower based I always hated the idea of repeating through multiple customers because if a relationship went south with customer A I didn't want to have customers B, C, D and E pay the price, but maybe this isn't an option.  I would prefer to say with a Cambium/Ubiquiti as they are solid companies and I don't think they will be failing any time soon.  I had that problem a lot with early equipment, vendor A goes out of business, vendor B gets bought by vendor C and changes their equipment, so on and so forth.  I would like to get something in a licensed frequency as there is just a ton of noise in 2.4Ghz and even 900Mhz these days but I have no clue where to start (the FCC's website isn't the most obvious or user friendly).  I like what I've read about Telrad but they are a smaller company and I would hate to invest in a ton of equipment and infrastructure only to have them go out of business.  It would be great if Cambium/Ubiquiti would come up with some sort of LTEish product.  It seems like Ubiquiti is steering their company toward the enterprise AP market and away from the WISP market.  I'm new to the forum so I didn't see a particularly general area for posting questions.

--Mike


Hi mike!

welcome the cambium forums.  lots of good folks in here. 

I'll second erics remarks with LTE, its not a simple platform to get up and running. some of the lower cost vendors are still having some pretty significant reliability issues.  

that being said most of the LTE that's under $5,000 per enodeb is still just 2x2 and the sub 20k market is 4x4, past that you can get ahold of 8x8 release 14 enodes.   plus the costs of the headend hardware which varies quite wildly.   the cpes are generally reasonable, 100 to 200 depending on what you want.  like eric said, the 3.65 (soon 3.5 to 3.7) is all most of us have to work with, some areas you can get 2.5 but very few.  

as far as what is equipment is good for 2.4 and 900.   in my opinion its cambium. 

the 900 mhz ptp450i can be synced with your pmp100 so you can transition at your pace.   it deal with multipath vs the 100 doesn't.   you've already seen the dependability of the canopy product so i'll skip over that. 

with the M2 rockets i'm sure you've delt with the channel reuse and self interference headaches at some point in time, uplink modulations are crashing etc with panels are busy.   the epmp 2.4 sync APs will allow you to add gps sync to those old M2 subs and you'll experience a good gain in performance over the M2 rockets on same size channels.  with sync its possible to run 4 20mhz wide APs on the same tower, on 2 channels and get 8x the speed of 4 rockets running 10 mhz channels.    with sync you'll also have no uplink interference from your own APs.   you'll find that the epmp does a great job NLOS compared to having to keep the UBNT at very high powers to just maintain good performance.   for us, or installation standard on the UBNT was 60db orbetter, in some areas where we don't have other noise, we can run epmp cpes down to -75 and still hold MCS 12 12 with happy customers. 

the air interface is a lot different than the wifi interfaces of other products as well. it does a wonderful job of distributing g the air time evenly so one very poor connection can't kill the entire AP. 

the epmp link fully supports SNMP, ubnt doesn't.    it also support radius with dictionaries so you can above your billing software provision speed to your customers rather than having to make a bill, then manually tell your radio or router what to do.   to my knowledge ubnt can't do that. 

UBNT has had a rash of major security vulnerabilities in the recent past. 

the cambium folks are very driven to make a rock solid product and are very, very upfront about whats going on. they listen to the community and make the changes that the community asks for as a group.  (the force 180 and 200 are direct results of community feed back on the original models) 

cambium also has some great products announced for release at the end of the year, they tend to meet thier deadlines on product releases. many vendors tend to over sell and hype a product past what it can do, in my opinion cambium tends to under promise on these announcements. 

the 2x2 AC products are not much of an improvement if any at all for most operators out there.  some people have had great results with mimosa. 

UBNT air fiber lines are pretty nice, we use the AF5 and AF5x in noise free and short to medium range shots because its low cost and good for what it costs. anything challenging PTP650 is the way to go, or get to licenced hardware for backhauls 

the LTU, well UBNT has a marketing team that does a great job promoting thier products and telling everyone about how amazing its going to be to the point its made most of the seasoned wisps extremely leery of what they have to say.   i personally can't say it won't be good. but i definatly will not be in the front of the line for that.  

the LTU, in what is promises is essentially what 450 is. proprietary, synced, scalable without bounds and massive capacity.    the LTU could turn into a standards based platform, but that is still very TBD.   the 450 is 5 years old, and nothings caught up to it until last year,  right when cambium released 14x14 mimo APs for the 450 and is now back to 7x speed out in front with sync.   with those APs, in 40mhz of spectrum your looking at a max capacity of 2gbps.  no one else can claim anything near that. 

UBNT AC line is good for low density environments with limited noise issues, and a limited need for AP density, in that particular area, the ubnt line is slightly less expensive and would work well. 

cambiums devices are made specifically for dense and challenging environments with the need for some series scaling.  

there are a lot of good stories in the stories section, stop and read them if you haven't. I'd also suggest you find some threads about differently problems both companies have had relating to the products and see how they both handle them.   vendor support is critical for us, and one company definitely stands apart with that. 

there is some facebook groups for wisp that a few thousand operators are on, plenty of good information there as well.  

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