I am looking to switch to cambium for Outdoor wireless needs. We’re primarily a MikroTik shop for the majority of our rural outdoor customers.
Having issues with some existing Outdoor MikroTik AP’s - trying to use the newer qcom-ac drivers on their ARM IPQ-4019 devices. Successful, but not yet suitable for multiple SSID’s and client stability issues. [dynamic provisioned wlan interfaces create and break vlan assignments].
Anyways -
We’re looking to replace some existing sectors [mANTBoxes AC’s] with Cambium XV2-2T1 - WiFi6 AP’s.
Questions -
Can we manually adjust the antenna-gain on these access points, to turn them down? Or would this be through TX-power?
Love to be able to beta a unit for a customer. The price-point is higher, but the long term we feel the product should pay for itself.
Hopeful for better client user experience [connectivity in noisy environment], also the fact cnMaestro has integrated Voucher support. We had to migrate to a 3rd party hotspot solution since RouterOS 7.0… [New userman is terrible for voucher]
Understood! I do see that is adjustable within cnMaestro. Antenna-gain would just come into play for when we have AP with external antenna’s
Anyone here have real life experience with the XV2-2T1 [Sector] and -2T0 [Omni] for client access connectivity? The cost to entry of these are a bit higher than others, and appears the previous outdoor models have been discontinued. We use Meraki or Aruba for other customers - but that is a different market vertical we handle.
Our MikroTik AP’s are stable – but we do get frequent calls about some end-user connectivity and are constantly making changes. Most likely due to them not playing nice when there is interference.
Hi we’ve used XV-2T0 and XV2-2T1 extensively in projects and they are really really good.
Obviously you have to do your homework in terms of placement, freq, noise floor etc.If it’s badly scoped and desgined nothing is really going to work for you.Cambium have a half decent planner on the site for gratis if you want to test or tweak your designs before an install.
If distance if important to you on some of our sites with clear LOS 500m 20/5 is easily achievable connecting to a mid tier tablet/smartphone.
Have a lot of mikrotik experience, and these radios are several tiers up from tik wireless in terms of noise immunity,client stability,density and paired with cnMaestro much much more liveable as a day to day management item.
As a side note the pictures don’t quite tell you how big they are.These are big boys, so make sure your towers or walls have space to accomodate them.
This is helpful and makes me feel more comfortable. The points you mentioned are what we’re looking to improve on. The Tik’s work until they dont when environment changes with noise or sudden issue with external hotspot. Any experience with hardware failures or Cambium support / warranty?
We see majority of the hardware has a 3-year warranty. Big advantage over the Tik and Ubt.
It’s professional grade equipment so you have actual support. There are various levels of support with X/CambiumCare etc depending on your needs.Unlike Mikrotik they are open to new features. If you submit a fr and there’s enough demand they will usually end up rolling it out eg The auto rollout feature they’ve released recently on cnMaestro cloud etc
No issues on warranties, though this could be different from country to country. Supply the invoice/po and serial number of the faulty equipment on your ticket and tie in with your supplier where you bought the kit from.Usually no hassle swap out after you do remote session diag with tech and they conclude kit is faulty.
Mmhm… I am passionate about MikroTik – deployed ALOT of their hardware over the years. We deployed some UBT awhile back, but I stay away and am allergic to their hardware and practices. The new MikroTik AX wireless is “better”, but RouterOS 7.14 and higher is falling apart.
Anyways; we’re at a point to pivot and jump ship to Cambium. In the end, there is a marginally higher up front cost to customer - but we should recoup with less trouble calls / issues. Even when we manually select channels and do our part - its a struggle.
We will see if we can get our hands on one of these XV2-2T access points and into customers environment for real POC.
I’ve considered the smaller Omni within the XV2 series; but the directionals might be better for this RV Park / Campground we have in mind to test with.
Unless the Cambium outdoor Omni’s are just that much better than 'Tik and UBT with noise immunity and actually “just working” with clients connected.
Get cambium support involved with your poc and let them help you with stuff like Aircleaner,Cac etc.
For us a happy customer is a paying customer so we shifted away from Tik for that reason as the complaint tickets were never ending.
Also we have a lot of sites overseas so working with cnMaestro as a campus manager makes life so much easier for the team especially now that they’ve put in the client analytics stuff recently in cnMaestro.
We still have tons of Tik routing (OSPF,BGP,MPLS) going on so I’m not anti Tik just never touch their wireless anymore for my own sanity.
I have used XV2-2T0 in marinas. They worked very well. I would use them again. That said, the video of showing them outdistancing a competitor in a wide open range may be true, but when you insert a real world environment with clutter, the signal propagation of the XV2 radios is in line with others like Cisco and Ruckus. Their appeal is the price point compared to the others I mentioned. Good deal!
I have installed cambium APs for multiple Campgrounds and is a great replacement for mikrotik. I too have started with the mANT 12, 19, 15s, and 52s. I love mikrotik and the range of the wifi signal cannot be beat, but the wifi stability is far better with cambium. I current use mikrotik for my switching, Pfsence for routing and Cambium for WiFi
Great feedback and input! I appreciate you all replying and the positive feedback. Makes us feel more comfortable to make the switch . We’re more for stable client connectivity and to be constantly chasing phantom issues [disconnects]
@Thomas_Schmidt we also use alot of MikroTik switches [powerbox pros, and the CSS610s, etc], along with routers. Great success with their 60G for PtP links.
Been using Mikrotik routing for 15 years now. Their radios have been garbage for along time and they COULD NOT fix there old proprietary drivers. Now they have the quirks and learning curve of manufactures drivers.
But there is NOTHING in the Tik arsenals to answer for the XV2-2T.
Had to get away from Tik Radios in 2019. They couldn’t fix a bug I brought them. At the end of 2023 they changed drivers and in 2024… the issue I reported in 2018 is MOSTLY FIXED. Thats not reasonable at all.
Went back to Ruckus for a long time there. But they have managed to release years worth of buggy firmware. I used to put in Ruckus and forget them. Now I have to vette the crap out of a firmware and am still using one that is several years old as its actually stable.
I have moved most of my work over the last 2 years to Cambium. When I bring them an issue… they actually do something about it.
And Ruckus Outdoor can cut through interference. but it can’t get anywhere near the range. The size of the antennas really make the difference in WiFi calling at a distance.
Anyone have the XV2-23T0A00-US omni deployed in larger environments, along side the larger sector AP’s to back fill area’s?
Very little to no information on the internet on these radio’s real life performance. Looking to use these instead of MikroTik NetMetal AC’s that are deployed. The EIRP and built-in antenna gain on these XV2-23T look really nice.
Nervous to make changes for this one customer. But we may just deploy some NFR radio’s in-place of existing 'Tiks to see how they perform. If we get satisfactory results, we would love to be 100% cambium and leverage the integrated EasyPass, rather than third-party voucher service.
So let me get this straight… the XV2-2T0 has a quoted link capacity of “5 GHz radio 1,201 Mbps & 2.4 GHz radio 573.5Mbps”, only supports 80MHz channels, has a 2.5 Gbe port.
Whereas the XV2-23T has a quoted link capacity of “5 GHz radio 2,402 Mbps & 2.4 GHz radio 573.5 Mbps”, supports 160MHz channels, and only has a 1 Gbe port?
The antennas and Max EIRP are as near as makes no difference.
Can someone help me understand? Has the XV2-2T0 been given new firmware that supports 160MHz channels by chance? If not, I’m unsure why anyone would want the more expensive XV2-2T0…
Anyone have some insight here?
I agree with your statements. Be nice if Cambium can provide insight and details here. The same can be said for the similar indoor AP’s models.
IE: XV2-21X and XV2-2X models…
I’m looking at the XV2-23T instead of the VX2-2T0 omni due to price point. Unsure what the need for the larger omni given specs and EIRP. What is the advantage? Better antenna pattern on the larger 2T0?
Great question both of you. I like this type of Q&A. I have a draft white paper that talks about how to interpret “datasheets”. Datasheets is where you will find the technically accurate, yet sometimes misleading data if not interpreted correctly. let me start with the difference between XV2-2T0/XV2-2T1 and XV2-23T.
XV2-2T0 and 2T1
PRO
High efficiency antennas. These APs have some unique designs that reduce loss and really work very well for long range and high density. We have several deployments with thousands of these APs delivering solid connectivity over 1 km. Please note: this does not mean you will get 1km all the time or even most of the time. I wrote a blog on that a few years ago, it’s on the Cambium blog site.
Every place these APs have won vs competitive APs, they will net a greater range, easily 2X the range. This has been true in dense urban environments where cities are deploying public access Wi-Fi, to industrial/mining operations, to outdoor high density music events and sports venues.
CON
The XV2-2T0 and 2T1 are physically larger than the 23T (about 60%) to accommodate the antennas, so if aesthetics is a prime concern, take a look at the 23T.
XV2-23T
PRO
More compact design that the 2T0 and 2T1 and lower cost. the 23T is more general purpose enteprise. MDUs, Hotels, Enterprise, Campus often use this AP where range and high density is not the primary concern. Where ease of install, aesthetics and cost are principal concerns.
CON
The 23T supports 128 connected, active devices per radio. This number is fine for 90% of use cases, but it will not be useful in a high density network where the connected devices could range from 50 to 150 during the day. This does happen so understand the user density before choosing the 23T.
Note that I did not talk about throughput, Ethernet port speeds, or channel width. Because these datasheet items will not be as important as the radio interface and antennas. Consider just a few comments:
Ethernet port speed
The aggregate throughput is the sum of all the Wi-Fi clients. For reasons stated below, it will be rare, if ever, to produce > Gigabit of throughput on an average outdoor Wi-Fi 6 AP. On a test bench with one client, yes, but not in a real deployment. Please continue reading.
Channel Width
An Outdoor AP will deal with a lot of signals from other Wi-Fi or other 5 GHz transmitters. in a high density network, that includes interfering signals from other APs in the same network and interference from the very clients that the AP must support. Why do I say that? Because all Wi-Fi (in fact all radio transmissions) are half-duplex. Only one device can talk at a time. These devices talk very fast, and send their data in milliseconds, thus many devices can share the same frequency at the same time. But all those milliseconds add up in a high density or high contention environment. The way to overcome this is to use more frequencies by reducing the channel width to 20MHz or 40MHz. We have several deployments using 40MHz channels outdoors, but you many need to drop to 20MHz to get clear frequencies. So the datasheet of 23T showing 160MHz is true, but not too useful in most real-world networks.
What about MU-MIMO?
outside of a lab environment, MU-MIMO does not deliver the theoretical aggregate throughput benefits. It does deliver SNR improvements (as a result of transmit beamforming) so the client connections will be better quality. this is one reason that Wi-Fi 6 is much better than Wi-Fi 5. there are more reasons.
So what am I supposed to do?
if you have read this far, I’ll summarize some things to keep in mind.
Determine your client density and target range
Determine the aesthetic requirements
Check the applications that will use the Wi-Fi (streaming media, short form videos, email, social media, video calls) and calculate the over-subscription rates for each application (I have some data on that)
Do some testing with 40 MHz. You can use the built-in Wi-Fi Scan utility in cnMaestro to see other signals in the area. If you can use 40 MHz channels, do it.
Prune out some of the old legacy protocols, such as 802.11b. Don’t be too aggressive however. Outdoor networks will always need “range” since they don’t have walls and doors to block people from moving around.
Have fun! Engineering a great solution is very rewarding,
. We’re more for stable client connectivity and to be constantly chasing phantom issues [disconnects]