Probably a dumb question but what parts of the Evo platform was PMP and what was ePMP? Looking at former webinars and data sheets, it seems the 5/6ghz part of Evo was 802.11be, and the 3ghz CBRS was FPGA? Is that a correct interpretation?
If so then did the whole thing go to Airspan or stay with the ePMP team and if not did Airspan get the 3ghz parts and ePMP keep the 5/6ghz parts?
More likely the APs were to be based on the former 450mv concept, and the SMs were to be a mix of industrial/commercial ones based on the existing 450v SMs and lower cost ones perhaps designed by the ePMP team. I notice one of the EVO webinars involved Matt Mangriotis PLM for 450v and Antony Holmes VP Engineering for Cambium UK originally with Orthogon and now at Airspan.
Personally I was never confident we would ever see EVO and I suspect this puts the nail in the coffin but I could be wrong. If Airspan still wants a product to compete with Tarana G2 they could revive the concept, but unlikely they would make it backward compatible with ePMP at this point. Another question would be how much 450 backward compatibility to saddle the R&D team with.
Sounds like some senior executive said (1) we can’t afford 2 R&D teams I want the product lines converged and (2) we need a product to compete with Tarana G2 and (3) OBTW no products left behind so it needs to be backward compatible with every ePMP and 450 product out there. And probably the people who remembered the PMP430 APs with the FSK connector for backward compatibility with PMP100 Canopy SMs just sighed.
I think EVO is effectively dead at this point. With PMP going to Airspan and ePMP going to someone else potentially, I don’t think there will ever be interoperability between the two.
See I read it differently. I saw it as Cambium realizing that the PMP platform was getting long in the tooth and that Wifi 7/8 (802.11be) with MLO would outpace the FPGA PMP450 line and be cheaper to make.
They did not want to leave behind the existing PMP450 users so they would make it backwards compatible with PMP450 SMs and being 802.11be chipset based there would be already ‘easy’ ePMP 4k support.
The added FPGA in the Evo was probably to give the 802.11be based hardware some Tarana like features using the FPGA as a co-processor along with providing the PMP450 backwards support. So that would have made Evo a way to migrate PMP450 users over to the cheaper to make ePMP line.
Really outside of the 3+5/6ghz integrated AP the Evo AP product line looked more like ePMP than PMP.
To me interoperability was not a concern as I have no PMP450 products. I was more interested in the Tarana like capabilities along with the Dual band support (3+5/6) and ePMP 4k support.
But Tarana G1/G2 are not designed around WiFi chips. They may have done some ASICs though.
Same with us. Being able to have all three bands on one access point would be great. We were planning on putting some of those up.
Yes I know Tarana is not Wifi chipset based. I only meant that it looked like Evo used wifi chipsets as the core and maybe was to use a FPGA to handle some Tarana like things like interference mitigation and n=1 frequency reuse.
The original goal for EVO was to use low cost 802.11be/WiFi soc for the clients with ePMP software on them. The 3GHz client radio would use an RF downconverter to support that band. On the AP side it would use an FPGA with ePMP software running on it. The AP was designed to be modular so you could add in like a 5, 6, 3, or even 2.4GHz radio modules. In terms of backwards compatibility, there were plans to port the ePMP software to run on the PMP450b and i radios. PMP450v support was dropped from the EVO equation for unknown reasons. The whole EVO platform would revolve heavily on support from the ePMP team. Towards the end, the ePMP team had produced some alpha “e5k” PtP radios for testing (I had a pair for awhile). To my knowledge the PMP450 team didn’t have any working prototypes for EVO products.
Now that Airspan has taken over PMP450, I’m told it’s not entirely dead but the goals for EVO have shifted and scaled back considerably. Signs point to a more conservative refresh of the 450 line, along with correcting some of the major complaints/issues with the 450v.
So if I am understanding correctly, Airspan got the Evo FPGA hardware and will repurpose it for a PMP450 refresh? Does that mean the ePMP team kept the ePMP software that Evo ran on since it was ePMP based, or does the ePMP have to somewhat start from scratch to design new ePMP 5k 802.11be hardware/software?
To my knowledge no EVO firmware development actually happened. The ePMP team was too busy finishing e4k and starting work on e5k. All ePMP assets, software, developers, etc… are (possibly) going to Univastu.
EVO was a marriage between the PMP450 and ePMP teams and product lines… with that marriage off, they take their respective product lines and experience with them to their new owners.
My recollection is Ubiquiti used the WiFi chip + transverter approach for 900MHz and 3GHz, and it didn’t work very well. At least in their implementation. I also remember Ligowave taking this approach. Wow, they still exist?
Eric, that’s interesting. I didn’t realize how ePMP centric the EVO roadmap was. Seems like I was right however that it was nowhere near production ready. It had a “vaporware” feel to it.
I found a Cambium blog article from March 2024 Boost Fixed Wireless Performance mentioning the 450mv as the “next generation of the MU-MIMO access point”, so I didn’t imagine it.
But quickly we stopped hearing about the 450mv and about the same time we heard about EVO. So it was a natural assumption that the 450mv became the EVO MU-MIMO AP. Apparently a wrong assumption, but that’s what happens when we assume.
Way back in the day, when we were doing mini PCI Wi-Fi cards in Mikrotik or StarOS router boards, we bought the cards from Xagyl and from Doodle Labs which had converters in them. Xagyl had the XM900 which were internally 2.4 chipsets, then down converted to the 900 megahertz range. And as well there was some card (I forget the exact make/model) which was internally a 5 GHz card, and then down converted into the 3.x gigahertz range.
For the time, they both worked pretty good for edge cases.
Cambium ePMP, like UISP and MTik, has a sticky situation with chips. Sure, an 802.11be chip is immensely powerful, but Qualcomm isn’t Atheros and hasn’t seemed as willing to open up the drivers and let the WISP radio vendor customize the way they used to. Methinks UI created LTU because they didn’t want to depend on Q any more. It’s all SDR now so really an FPGA or chip platform could do the job, in theory, but at least with the FPGA they are in control, not Q. But that costs more. I can see the logic behind Evo, with a cheap chip SM and an AP with an FPGA for compatibility with both the 450 and ePMP lines. And perhaps a newer, cheaper FPGA could lower the cost of building 450s. But that’s now Airspan’s baby.
It seems to me that Univastu would have reason to continue the line. Just as Mimosa was bought by Jio with a lot of Asian market focus, Asia is a big market for ePMP too, but that doesn’t mean they have to abandon the US and EU markets. It’s not consumer Wi-Fi so the protectionist ban is unlikely to keep the product out, though 5 GHz devices here do need to be US-locked.
