Yes, acknowledged that you see the pricing problem with other top brands, too. It’s a problem with WiFi networking gear in general, but it is one that I don’t really understand since it seems to be a somewhat new phenomenon and bucks historical trends when it comes to standards-based commodity tech. You even see it in consumer grade gear, where the average price of a home router with WiFi has been rapidly creeping up over recent years. Remember the days when 802.11g home APs were comfortably sub-$100 at retail? On day of release? Now people are spending $200 or more on the usual suspects (Netgear/Linksys/etc.) if they want something “current”, while last-gen (or even older) gear from these brands is still getting cranked off the manufacturing line and selling for roughly same MSRP as when it was introduced. It’s kind-of nuts and only ensures that we will be continuing to deal with “new” 802.11n and ac deployments and their limitations for years to come rather than being allowed to put them behind us and move on.
But it’s not even just that 11ac E-series Pilots still sell for $300 while the WiFi 6 Pilots are 2x that. It’s that the Ubiquiti WiFi 6 hardware sells for half the cost of a WiFi 5 E-series!! Which makes a WiFi 6 Pilot a whopping 4x the unit cost of a comparable (by the spec sheet) UBNT product.
Which brings me back to my question: is Cambium WiFi REALLY worth 4x the cost of UBNT? And if so, what about it justifies that cost? I’m genuinely asking: I haven’t touched UBNT WiFi 5 or 6 gear myself so I just have no context for how good or bad it is, or what the common problems are with it that would cause one to “rip out and replace in 6 months”.
What I can tell you, though, is that I am quickly becoming underwhelmed by the Cambium enterprise offerings as a whole. Between the bug that’s the subject of this thread (which, thankfully, I have yet to run into personally) and the one that I started my own thread about (Specific VAPs (one SSID on one radio) randomly stops bridging (some?) traffic), we’re talking two showstopper bugs that are both active & ongoing concerns, not ones that cause “mere annoyance”. It also absolutely does not help that the bug we are fighting was brought to our attention by one of our loudest customers, and that currently we have no real solution for them other than perhaps to rip out and replace the Cambium with UBNT (so, how’s that for irony). So all of this taken together leaves me wondering how well either we or the customer were actually served by us convincing them that it would be worth it for them to pony up a little extra for the “superior” Cambium solution.
I also have no direct experience with UBNT support, though I’ve heard troubling reports second-hand. MTik on the other hand I have extensive dealings with…their main problem support-wise is responsiveness, and occasionally language barrier issues. But in all fairness, I have to say that I’ve brought plenty of bugs to their attention over the years that they have turned around and fixed for me (it helps if you can repro the issue and give them minimum viable config; in my experience they are good at understanding well-formulated bug reports and acting on them). But MTik’s problem product-wise on the WiFi side is that they are constantly years behind the curve, even if they are cheap. Great routing and switching products for the $, not-so-great on WiFi side.
The ticket I filed for our bug will be the first real taste of Cambium support that I (personally) will experience. And though it’s early in the ticket lifecycle, and I’m willing to give them some time and some slack, I gotta say that the responses I’ve seen so far are not instilling me with much confidence…
(There are some manufacturers where I have gone through this song-and-dance more than once. You’d think after the first 2-3 times I was proven right that the fault was with the product that they’d have learned to trust me, and we could just skip past that first unproductive part. I try to make a habit out of not crying wolf.)