Hi;
The support for the new FCC 6GHz unlicensed band.
"On April 23 2020, FCC unleashed 1200 MHz of spectrum between 5.9725 and 7.125 GHz, for unlicensed use. “New rules adopted by FCC open U-NII-5 and U-NII-7 bands for outdoor use as Standard-Power Access Point and Client Devices. "
When will ePMP or Cambium products support this? Will this most likely be a firmware upgrade?
"An automated frequency
coordination system will prevent standard power access points from operating where they
could cause interference to incumbent services. " and it looks like it's also allowing higher power, 41.3 dBm ?
Looks and smells like CBRS/SAS :(
You won't be seeing that on ePMP via a firmware upgrade. Also, I don't believe any of the antennas on the integrated radios will work at the higher frequencies. The ePMP 3000 sector is listed as 4.9 GHz to 5.97 GHz , no firmware upgrade will change that.
You can get a Special Temporary Authority from the FCC right now to use 5850-5895 and a firmware upgrade from Cambium will enable it on the radios once you have the STA.
@brubble1 wrote:...... and it looks like it's also allowing higher power, 41.3 dBm ?
. .
Check this out.
Seems we are getting screwed power wise for SMs. Lists max EIRP as 30dbm for SMs. Still 36dbm for APs.
It looks to be 36dBm EIRP for APs, and 30 for clients... I don't see anything about 41.3dBm.
I don't see any obvious reason that an SM couldn't be AFC controlled, and run at 36dBm, but it would probably need to have GPS, so that may not make sense.
The AFC system appears to be much less complex than CBRS's SAS, so I wouldn't judge anything based on that mess...
The only obvious hardware requirement for AFC is GPS, so I wouldn't rule out that it could be done via a firmware update, but we'll obviously have to wait for any answer from Cambium... I'd expect the frequency range to be a much bigger issue and it's pretty unlikely that it would be able to work on anything more than the very bottom end of the 6ghz band, if that. Just because an antenna is only rated for up to 5.97ghz doesn't mean that it won't work a bit higher... it just might not work too well. I wouldn't be surprised if it still had pretty decent gain for as much as we're likely to get out of any of the existing radios anyway.
I suspect that we'll have to wait for a wifi6 based product before we can get too much use out of this band, but it's not going to be usable outdoors until the AFC system is up and running anyway.
The power limit on 6 GHz will be 30 dBm for a "client" that is not connected to an AFC. If the client talks to AFC itself and has sufficient GPS capability, then it is treated the same as an AP and can use the +36 dBm power level. It must stay down at +30 when initially connecting to the AP before talking to the AFC (no "handshake" like we should have on CBRS, where CatB is much more than 6 dB above EUD).
The hard part is GPS. It doesn't have to be internal to the unit, but it has to be something that the FCC trusts. The example they give is an indoor AP that can't hear GPS, so a GPS unit goes on the LAN near a window. So some kind of little GPS dongle in the PoE path might work, for instance, but it has to be developed.
My guess is that the chips inside the ePMP line can go somewhat above 6GHz, but integral antennas were not designed to go there so they may not work, and there may be filters. So a new SKU might be needed for best performance and widest frequency coverage.
The AFC won't be nearly as elaborate as the SAS. It will require registration, but won't be doing power aggregation, which is a real bear on CBRS. It will require only daily check-ins, with a grace day to account for possible outages (same as TVWS). And it won't need an ESC. So there are likely to be mor AFC than SAS options, and lower prices for the service.
@fgoldstein wrote:The hard part is GPS. It doesn't have to be internal to the unit, but it has to be something that the FCC trusts. The example they give is an indoor AP that can't hear GPS, so a GPS unit goes on the LAN near a window. So some kind of little GPS dongle in the PoE path might work, for instance, but it has to be developed.
So something the FCC/IC trusts? PacketFlux inliine POE + GPS timing that has been used for years fits this. So it has been developed and they now support Cambium Sync (which is different than Canopy Sync).
The physical antenna matrix should be ok up to 7Ghz, not much difference in the dimensions of the elements themselves but the RF filter networks are tuned to reject and prevent transmission outside of the approved wanted band(s).
So to make this work, we should need a epmp3000L with timing over ethernet and with a filter network for 5800 to 6800MHz (frequency split is a suggestion, FCC/IC approval required).
Should be ready in 2 years ;P