Its good to see all the feedback on this thread I am glad I started it.
We have actually considered investing in the 450 platform is 2.4. Its not the AP cost that keeps us away is that we are growning quickly and the SM cost would really increase our ROI. So we double deploy sometimes tripple. Each site gets 4 -90 degree 450i 900mhz
4 90 degree 2.4 ePMP
and sometimes 5ghz ePMP generally inside a KP dual antenna with the 2.4.
on the rare occasion we have los we install 5ghz.
But our preferered / go to platform for installs is 2.4 epmp and in the rural enviorment noise is not to bad. trees are a double edged sword. Hard to install but eat noise up.
Our equipment of last resort is 900 450i not because of noise we have learned how to use it but because of cost and the limits of the AP to move bandwidth. We try and keep the loads light.
I agree 2.4 and 900 are dead in many places but in places where 5ghz only deployments would mean death to a wisp as a business 2.4 and 900 are viable options.
We are target atleast 5 new towers a summer ( our build season) and a few micro pops so we are not huge but that is still 20+ 2.4 APs each year that we would go right to the 2000 platform. Add to that the upgrades at other tower locations and we would be purchasing a few.
That said I assume cambium looks at the global market and sees only 2.4 being used in the USA and Canada. I also assume they can see the sames numbers.
Still we can hope for something to come down the pipe in 2.4 some day. ePMP 1000 cant be the end of the road for cambium products and 2.4 long term I wouldnt think.
Yes thank you for that. Can't believe I had not run across that somewhere before. I just went on two AP's and changed them to 5ms and 10MGz and much better connections now. We try and put our low end customers only on the 2.4 for obvious reasons as I'm sure most everyone does. Thanks for stating that in this thread!
Cambium_Sri wrote: 5 MHz and 10 MHz are not available only with 2.5 ms frame size. With 5 ms frame size, 5 and 10 MHz are available and you can do GPS sync with them.
Actually, all channel widths used to be available in both frame sizes. So in older firmwares, you could choose 10 Mhz channel and 2.5 Mhz frame sizes, which is how I ran to the link at my home for quite a while.
Then, a new firmware came along (maybe about a year ago or so) and in there, the 2.5ms frame disappeared in 10 Mhz channel widths. I was told at that point that it would be added back in, but that each firmware revision it was 'extra work' essentially.
So - it is possible, it used to exist in ePMP. It's just that 5 & 10 Mhz channel widths are not 'native' so they need to be added in. It'd be great to have that added back in, once Elevate stops dominating all the development time.
Sorry but 5/10 MHz was never supported on 2.5 ms frame size. These channel bandwidths are not native to the chipset and work is needed to ensure timing is met in terms of performance, reliability and sync. If we had done this work and included it in a release it would take a lot of convincing and undoing of a significant amount of work to remove it. 2.5ms was introduced primarily for syncing PMP 100 legacy radios, which support only 20 MHz channels. This way operators who are/were using PMP100 in their network have a slightly easier upgrade/migration path to ePMP. ePMP Elevate is another migration tool and there is quite a bit of demand for it as a migration path.
We're also in the position where there just isn't a viable alternative to 2.4ghz in a lot of areas we cover, so we're kind of stuck with just making it work as good as we can. In some cases 900mhz is a good option, but it is expensive and there is limited spectrum, so we pretty much only use it where nothing else can work.
We put up a lot of towers with only 2.4ghz APs, because when we originally put them up, we didn't think there would be more than a couple customers that would have LOS, and we didn't feel it was worth putting up 5ghz APs - but as we have added 5ghz APs to those towers, we've found that we typically end up with a lot more customers working on 5ghz than we expected. This why I love Lite APs, we can throw a Lite AP with an omni on a tower for very little cost, so even if it only ends up ever getting 1 or 2 customers on it, it will pay itself off... and if it does end up with more than 10 customers on it, it's a simple upgrade.
Sorry to be a party pooper, but we will not be buying any more 2.4GHz products. Period. The noise in the band, much like 900, make it worthless. The noise floor at the tower usually isn't so bad. It's the noise at the SM. From the customer's own router, to their neighbor's router, extra APs for large homes, security systems, etc. When the downlink SNR is 7dB, you're not gonna get much out of it.
for us the customer side noise has been very manageable. we've replaced almost all of our ptp100 900mhz customers with epmp 2.4 with great overall results. I'll definitely agree that in town or busy areas 2.4 can be hard to use BUT in rural areas 2.4 has been a life saver for us. (epmp 2.4 that is)
for us the customer side noise has been very manageable. we've replaced almost all of our ptp100 900mhz customers with epmp 2.4 with great overall results. I'll definitely agree that in town or busy areas 2.4 can be hard to use BUT in rural areas 2.4 has been a life saver for us. (epmp 2.4 that is)
2/3s of our customers are connected to epmp 2.4
We too have had pretty good results with ePMP 2.4, rural North and South Carolina. It helped to establish a routine where the installers are supposed to note the channel in use to the tower, and either advise the customer or explicitly log into the customer's router and lock it to a clean channel. (or at least not the same one the SM is using) I'd love to try out an ePMP2000 variant of the 2.4ghz AP, but honestly I think when we see crippling interference on 2.4 it's 80%+ of the time at the SM end, not the AP end.
Our problem at this point is finding gear to update the hundreds of customers we still have NLOS on PMP100 900MHz gear with 17dB yagis. Owner so far is unwilling to commit to updating it all to PMP450 900MHz, but he's coming around. (but he still insists on sticking with the Cambium dual-pol 900MHz Yagi, which is only 12dB, refusing to pay almost twice as much for the KPP 17.5dB dual-pol 900 yagis - considering that more than half of our existing PMP100 900MHz customers are already on 17dB single-pol yagis that seems doomed to fail) Many of the customers who were able to connect via 12dB in 900MHz band are already migrated to 2.4 and 3.65 bands.
Cambium_Sri wrote: Sorry but 5/10 MHz was never supported on 2.5 ms frame size. These channel bandwidths are not native to the chipset and work is needed to ensure timing is met in terms of performance, reliability and sync
I want to say ''are you sure?'' - but I'm sure you must be sure. :) I was certain that I used to run 2.5ms frames and 10 Mhz channels when the shorter frames first came out, and that it went away after the next firmware update. BUT, you would be the guy who would know - so I must be mistaken. I'll have to check back in my email history to refresh my memory about what I'm referring too.
Can you share some more on your experience with moving / migrating from the PMP100 900Mhz to the ePMP 2.4GHz platform. We're looking into this as well. The PMP100 900Mhz serves us really well for those clients which were really difficult shots.
Once we had a good signal on the 900Mhz around -77dBm (-79dBM was borderline) or so, the customer stayed connected and at least we were able to maintain the customer account. We had 2.4GHz using regular 802.11B equipment before, but if the CPE wasn't within 1.5-2miles from the tower and had reasonable visibility (LOS) to the AP tower, we didn't use it. And we only did the 2.4GHz before getting Canopy PMP100 900MHz system.
Using LinkPLanner seems to show possible good results. We've used LinkPLANNER for all of our 5GHz ePMP installs and the numbers on paper tend to be real close to the real world deployment. This is giving us some confidence that if this holds true for the ePMP 2.4GHz platform as well, then we really can start to look at deploying the ePMP 2.4GHz as part of our NLOS and nLOS installations. Resulting in retaining and gaining more clients.
We would buy ePMP 2000 in 2.4GHz. We have UBNT and ePMP1000 in 2.4GHz running 10MHz channels. Would love to have 2000 with dynamic filters and beam forming.