I tried to post this on previous GPS 4500L threads, but they are closed.
Just wanted to chime in and say that where we are placing ePMP 4500L’s right next to 3000L’s we have, the GPS seems better. I don’t think this is poor antenna placement on the 3000L or anything - it seems like the 4500L is just overall better at GPS signal.
That is looking good! How has been the 4500L been for deployment? What kind of hurdles have there been? Seen alot of chatter on some of the WISP FB pages and some are saying the 4500 and 4600 and their respective SMs are garbage… some saying they are absolute crap. Always two sides to a story but been more and more reluctant to jump into either system, was really hoping to do a couple 6GHz deployments but not to sure now. Thoughts?
We only have 5Ghz 4500 stuff and 4525 SMs and everything is looking great. We haven’t waded into 4600 yet, and lots of our clients are spread out with a lot of longer shots, so I’m not sure we’re going to or not - but 4500 stuff is going well.
Obviously the firmware is new(ish) so it isn’t fully fleshed out yet - there isn’t full MUMIMO or BeamForming or MIR and TDD isn’t as scalable as it will be… some early adoption issues. But there are no show stoppers that I can see.
And what’s the option? if Cambium held the hardware until the firmware was perfect, then the same people would be complaining about how late to market they were. 
It think it’s going great and I think it’s on schedule for what I expected development to be.
Thank you for your reply. If I may… does the 4500 gps sync with 3000 radios? Is there MIR yet? How many subs on your 4500 APs?
Yes, they do sync, along with PMP450. Only 5ms frames are supported though. MIR is coming in firmware release 5.8.
We have one 4500 AP approaching 50 SM’s and delivering speed plans up to 100/20mbps, although most plans are 50mbps or less.
Thank you for your reply. I really appreciate the information.
Yes – as long as you’re using the same settings such as frame size (we use 5ms everywhere) and the same duty ratio (we use 75%/25%) then the 1000 and 2000 and 3000 and 4000 all happily sync with each other.
EDITED: YES, 5.8.0 HAS MIR/QOS
Not yet, but MIR is apparently coming next release. However, we just have a few friendly high use clients and they know they are ‘stress test’ clients, so they know they are wide open to push things. Unfortunately the ones we picked don’t have ideal signals or modulations… but still are screaming along really well.
We have not loaded anything up yet – we’re just putting a select few high use clients friendly clients on the 4500 for testing, and they are getting 300-400 mbit packages for the time being. They know they are ‘stress test’ clients and they are happy to be so.
Awesome, thank you for the reply and info! Greatly appreciated.
We have just begun deploying 4500L in our small town and comparing it to 3000 We will not fully deploy the 4500 until MIR is available and like ninedd, we are only turning up select customers, those who want 50 to 100 meg but we can’t reach with 60ghz, which is many.
So far the 4500 performance has been good under our limited conditions.
I’m in agreement that the GPS performance of the 4500L is much better than the 3000 and 1000. Not sure what they did to improve it but thumbs up!
We have not loaded the APs but as noted in previous areas, we have found the foliage penetration of the 4500 better than the 3000, in some cases significantly. We have a customer about 600 meters through quite a bit of tree coverage that was marginal on 3000 and was lucky to get 50 meg on a 40 MHz channel (they wanted 100). Best signal was a -72 with a F300CSM with a 28 db. gain dish, and signal levels/modulation would be all over the place in rain/windy conditions due to the foliage. Using the same dish with a F400CSM to a 4500L that was slightly lower on the tower than the 3000L and we are getting a -65 with MCS9 256 QAM with 140 down and it is much more stable in the same conditions. While it may change as the AP loads, the ping times are much better and consistent as well.
There are still some quirks. Connection times seem to be a bit long, especially if you have 80/40/20 channels all selected, you can slip into a coma waiting for the SM to eventually connect. Also had an instance where the GUI was reporting SUCCESS in connecting to two APs at the same time, but was actually only connected to one. The SNMP query for frame utilization appears to have changed or is not working. These are minor issues I’m sure will be resolved in future releases.
We will not be loading the 4500L for awhile so not to concerned with the reported load issues. I fully expect Cambium to get that worked out as the software improves.
We have not tried any long distance shots other than F400CSM PTP links, which have been very stable since 5.7
We have deployed a mixture of 4525 and 400CSM as CPE. Jury is still out on the 4525 as we just deployed those. Techs are questioning the design of the 4525 but time will tell. The F400CSM appears to work well but is definitely on the pricey side.
We have not tried the compatibility mode with the 3000 SMs yet, but we are fine with green field deployment of the 4500.
Overall, we expect the 4500 to allow us to offer up to 100xwhatever packages to customers who want it and combined with 60 Ghz will allow us to serve our customers with higher packages.
Still hoping Cambium will offer a 2.4 AX (shameless plug) version for our very rural and NLOS customers. Hopefully a lot of the software issues will be address when that is released.
We are looking at possibly deploying some 4600 for some shorter range PTP links to get our feet wet.
We will begin accelerating out 4500 deployment once 5.8/MIR is released and looking forward to further improvements in the software.
4500L has not delivered the promised interference benefits, and the latency/jitter is still worse than the 3000 series but otherwise no issues.
Seeing better throughput and modulations on 4500/4500L and some features like SFP on the Ethernet port of the 4500L are appreciated.
