Hello all, i am glad to be here.
I will write in full detalis in order to get correct guideness from you, and excuse me for bad english.
We are small semi WISP here in Sudan working in a 6x7km city. And we are expanding very well becuase of the low budget plans we use.
We are using a network toplogy not even close to what you can said (Typical WISP network) , but we are a poor side of the country.
The network schema is like this:
- All access points and backhaul is UBNT , all ap is M5 gears.
- All our plans is hotspots users using credits or vouchers.
- We use Mikrotik with radius in backbone.
- Our users connect to tower using 2 reqular omni-directional AP build on openwrt firmware , one is on house roof in a water-proof box conntected to the nearset M5 tower and the other in the house conntected to outside AP transmitting in 2.4ghz inside home.
- All our client AP is 2x2 mu-mimo wave2 with beam-forming support.
- We disable airmax in all M5 AP.
- The roof AP connected to M5 AP in a way it pass all devices mac of connected users to mikrotik for accounting and other stuff.
- We use mix of reqular AP and M2 antenna outside in some streets to work as a hotspot for our users.
This is the general topography.
Now we need to upgrade our system to Cambium gears.
Our main concern is the high price for SM device which it is impossible to be bought by our users. So we need first to upgrade our tower to suitable cambium product that give us the possibilty in working in standard wifi mode (It should accept connection from openwrt ap and insure that it pass the users device mac to our backend).
After upgrading all towers need for whole city coverage , we will move to some cheap SM’s from other venderos using solution like ePMP Elevate option, this is ofcourse if you suggest to go with epmp product.
The above step will start after we recover from all towers upgrade and return our upgrade costs inorder to arrange some flexible SM upgrade payment to our client.
Also i need to know, is all features in cambium product we still working in standard wifi mode ( gps, beamforming, tdma … etc)?
I am sorry again for large post, but i need to make my question clear as possible.
Thank you all.