Hi all, up until now we have used Force 300-25 dishes for clients, but we bought a approx 20 of 300-19 panels for a new housing estate that is only a few km from the AP. However, we have had two similar failures only a few weeks after deployment )during which time the worked perfectly), they both displayed the same symptoms, customer reports loss of internet service,tech calls out, radio can see the AP but wont associate. Tried re-flashing backup, firmware updates, nothing makes any difference. Replacing the SM radio and all is OK. Has anyone else had a similar experience with these radios? FW is 4.6.1 on AP and SM, tried 4.6.2 no difference.
Not sure if same thing but we have had a couple of 300-25’s do something very similar. The radio is working fine for months then suddenly it sees the AP but will not connect to it. When I looked at the logs the AP was claiming wrong password (or whatever the error is , it’s been a year or so) and refusing to let the radio connect. I go to the customer’s home, and make sure the password is entered correctly and still the AP claims it is the wrong one. In both cases the customer radios were able to see the neighboring sector on the tower at good enough signal that I tried connecting to them instead and it worked.
I suspect that rebooting the AP may have resolved the issue but in this case moving them to another AP was a satisfactory solution and I did not troubleshoot further. If I ever run into the same issue again though I will try rebooting the AP.
This was around a year ago so we would have been running v4.6.1 and on the first one to do this I did try reloading the software, defaulting the customer radio and configuring it but nothing worked so it really looked like it was the AP and not the Radio causing the problem.
I would suspect the hardware issue if the replacement solves the issue. Have you submitted the RMA case with Cambium Support?
Thank you
Fedor,
This is not usually a HW problem (though I will not discount HW), I have seen the same as Brubble where the SM will see the AP but can not connect, but will connect to another AP just fine using the same password. This is only with F300 HW that I’ve seen and yes an AP reboot does fix it. have seen this for years and has not been a major issue for us other than an annoyance that an SM is swapping APs (same password used for an entire tower incase one AP dies). This issue is still in 4.7.0 (have’nt been testing 4.7.1-RC6 long enough yet) and is just a time thing with no warning.
Fedor: I have sent them back to my supplier, he will no doubt RMA them.
Douglas: so will it happen again to the same SM or does it need a reboot every time a new SM gets connected? We have many 300-25s connected without this issue and uptime of many months.
I didn’t try rebooting the AP as this is not practical during the day, there are many people working from home especially so since Covid. Every interruption just annoys the customer and may makes them go off an seek an alternative. Almost every time we have an outage (which isn’t very often) on a sector we will lose at least 1 customer, sometimes more.
El3HG,
It is kind of hit or miss, can go months without an issue and suddenly an SM is blocked and associates to another AP. From the customers side, not much can be seen except if the signal is really bad and they are not getting their speeds. Most never notice there is an issue.
What we see is an AP with less SMs on it and this triggers us to look at the AP and make sure the customers are still getting their speeds. If its bad, we will reboot an AP but that needs to happen outside peak hours.
There is no real difference between the f300-19 and the f300-25 except the packaging. The -19 is a flat panel antenna array and the -25 is a focal point induced parabolic, but the radio car is the same, just the HW-ID code is different to state which antenna is on it.
If an outage is causing customers to look elsewhere then they are either not familiar with DSL and satellite or need a business connection with redundant links. We found that most of the time a customer wants to leave, its really not about the service, its about the cost or they have been convinced that wireless is not reliable and just needed an excuse.