Migrating from Mikrotik to Cambium

Products ePMP
1

Good day

We’re a small WISP in a rural area with primarily a Mikrotik network with close to 2500 customers. Our backhaul are mainly Mimosa B5C’s in congested areas and Mikrotik out in the sticks (if frequency interference is not an issue then Mikrotik works well). We’ve given up on Ubiquity a long time ago due to high failure rates and software issues (although our competitors seem to like them).

Our main problem is the limitations on a Mikrotik AP (and UBNT for that matter) regarding the amount of clients in relation to a good throughput/QOS ratio. This seems to be true for the majority of small WISP’s scouring the online forums for a solution. In our own experience (confirmed by online forums once again) exceeding 15 to 20 CPE’s per AP will cause degrading n service and customer experience in general. If you have a “bad” CPE and two or more customers with a 10Mbps+ package it gets even worse.

Currently we have several repeaters/high sites around the edges of town (5 to 10Km’s) and in some instances have more than a 100 customers pointing to one site. Sites like those already have five 120˚ sectors pointing towards town (setups are a Mikrotik Basebox with Titanium mid-gain sectors) in order not to have more than 20 customers per sector. They are well spaced (it’s our own mast) but obviously this is not ideal because of limited spectrum and the inevitable self-interference.

To get to the point, we are looking at alternative AP’s that’s more “carrier class” to negate self-interference. In our research we’ve come to the conclusion that Cambium might be the way to go considering all options including price/performance ratio. We’ve also looking at Mimosa because they perform well on our Ptp links where reliability and throughput is excellent. Unfortunately their Ptmp stuff is not available in our country yet and preliminary pricing sounds expensive for CPE’s.

My question is that if I replace the five Mikrotik Basebox 5’s on a high site with two Cambium ePMP1000 units (as I could then possibly split the 100 customers into two sets of 50?) will I be able to use the GPS sync functionality if the ePMP1000 operates in Wifi mode?  I’ve read with the new 2.6.x software version (and if I understand it correctly) that you can have both Wifi and Cambium ePTP mode active to support a mix of Cambium (in ePTP mode) and non-Cambium CPE’s (in Wifi mode). How would this work and how does it affect GPS sync where you can it be enabled and work for ePTP and Wifi mode?

Naturally I do not want to exchange all the Mikrotik CPE’s (a mix of Mikrotik SXT and Groove’s) at the same time as neither the customer or ourselves would want to incur unnecessary expenses hence the need for Wifi mode. I’m hoping to migrate the CPE’s over a period of time to the Force200 (or whichever suits the application best) but at the same time have the functionality of GPS sync at the high site.

I would appreciate some information in the regard as the GPS sync working in Wifi mode is an important consideration for migrating to Cambium.

2

Wifi mode will negate any of the ePMP benefits you seek as they aren't available there.   In wifi mode you can concurrently run both Cambium and other brand CPEs but it will all be vanilla 802.11, with all of the same potential issues.

An approach that I've used that has worked well is to replace one sector at a time, moving legacy clients to another legacy sector that they can hear well enough, until I can swap their CPEs out for the new Cambium units.

Forklift upgrades suck and always hurt your wallet.  If you have the option to do it sector by sector it should hurt a bit less.

3 Likes
3
Letaba wrote:  ...neither the customer or ourselves would want to incur unnecessary expenses hence the need for Wifi mode. I’m hoping to migrate the CPE’s over a period of time to the Force200 (or whichever suits the application best) but at the same time have the functionality of GPS sync at the high site.

I would appreciate some information in the regard as the GPS sync working in Wifi mode is an important consideration for migrating to Cambium.

Hi. Well, like Jacob says - WiFi mode is WiFi, and Cambium mode is Cambium. It's not really possible to have WiFi compatibility and to also have GPS Sync and Frequency reuse and so on.... all those special things are Cambium proprietary mode only (and the reasons that Cambium works so well) and you lose them when in WiFi mode.

So, this is what we did - we picked a sector, and switched out that whole sector as quickly as we could. We also retrieve 16 of our older non-Cambium units which we can put back into inventory, and we can use them in smaller AP's which are not Cambium yet. When we have something killed by lightning, or when we have 1 new customer on an AP with 8 non-Cambium CPE's on it, then we can use the retrieved gear and don't have to buy anything new.

ALSO - as far as the cost goes.... now that we've upgraded a sector to Cambium, we have real world personal data of how much better Cambium works. SO - we did the first sector on our dime, BUT we can now call other customers and offer them a $99 upgrade to faster gear with a faster plan. Even when we set the QOS at the same as our old equipment, the Cambium gear is so so much faster and more consistent. Of course, the $99 doesn't cover the whole cost and labor and mileage - but our plan is to switch 1,000 CPE's this year, and that $100K will go a long way to subsidizing it for sure.

1 Like
4

Thank you Jacob and Ninedd - I thought as much.

As per both your suggestions I will replace one sector at a time and upgrade the SM's one by one. How willl the remaining adjacent Mikrotik sectors affect the ePMT unit. Obviously they will have to remain there for a few months as this whole process is not going to take a day or two. The MT units don't have GPS sync and cannot "talk" to the Cambium and vice versa. Will the superior design of the Cambium radios negate interference from the MT's or will they only start perfoming once all the MT Sectoes have been replaced?. Also, as I'm a newbie to Cambium should I install a ePMP1000 or 2000 on the sector? Final question - can I use the existing Ubiquity Titanium Sector (I can deploy it somewhere else if I have to)?. If not - what would you suggest - Cambium's proprietary sectors or something else (I've been looking at RF Elements)?

5

The remaining mikrotik units may see a bit of extra interference from the Cambium gear but it shouldn't be much different than the current situation interference-wise.

The titanium sectors are quite good - they are our go-to unit for most sites due to their flexibility.  I would think that starting out with the 2000 units would be the way to go as they have some nice additional features over the 1000 units and are only slightly more expensive.  You could use the 2000 smart antenna if wanted with either the titanium sector or the cambium oem unit.

6
@Letaba wrote:

Thank you Jacob and Ninedd - I thought as much.

As per both your suggestions I will replace one sector at a time and upgrade the SM's one by one. How willl the remaining adjacent Mikrotik sectors affect the ePMT unit. Obviously they will have to remain there for a few months as this whole process is not going to take a day or two. The MT units don't have GPS sync and cannot "talk" to the Cambium and vice versa. Will the superior design of the Cambium radios negate interference from the MT's or will they only start perfoming once all the MT Sectoes have been replaced?. Also, as I'm a newbie to Cambium should I install a ePMP1000 or 2000 on the sector? Final question - can I use the existing Ubiquity Titanium Sector (I can deploy it somewhere else if I have to)?. If not - what would you suggest - Cambium's proprietary sectors or something else (I've been looking at RF Elements)?

Well, the 2000 AP's have a couple key benefits, but the 1000 AP's are still a very viable product too.  However, if I was doing it - I'd put up a 2000 AP.

The 2000 AP's have a dynamicly programmed filter in them, so that helps cut off signals which are 'off-channel'.  So, if your AP is set to channel 5700 Mhz, and there is some other nearby device at 5500 Mhz - normally, if it's close enough and loud enough - they can still interfere with each other.  WIth the 2000 AP's, they have this dynamicly programmed filter and it doesn't really matter if that off-channel interferrer is a -35 signal, the filter can block it out. Plus, it's a 2-way filter and that means that the Cambium AP is also cleaner off-channel, and won't bleed over into neighboring frequencies.

Secondly, if you add the beamforming antenna to a 2000 AP, that can dramatically increase the receive signal of the AP for it's SM's.  It's like a directional hearing aid - it knows where each SM is and it'll listen specifically to that SM when it is its turn to talk to the AP.  That also dramatically decreases the interference that the AP hears from nearby sources.

As for how much these will interfere with the existing MTik AP's...   well, that'll depend on how much channel separation and shielding and so on.  Obviously the MTik AP's can't sync and won't be able to schedule the RX/TX frames the same way.  BUT, if it's a 2000 AP, the dynamic filtering can really help - since if you have proper channel spacing, the 2000 AP's signals can actually be less interference than an unfiltered card at the same signal and distance.

For antennas, If you want to use what you have to save money, that's an OK idea.  However, I don't think I'd recommend buying anything except Cambium's own sectors. We've also had OK success with the KP Performance ones, but that's in 2.4 Ghz.  In 5Ghz, Cambium's sectors are small, affordable, with a great F/B ratio - and they are a good deal. That's what I'd buy.


However - your mileage may vary.  :)

2 Likes
7

Thank you both - ePMP2000's and Cambium sectors it will be then....

8

I am in the process of Migrating , Slowly, from Mikrotik to Epmp.  In my lab enviroment I can get the Force 200 to connect to my Ubiquiti UniFi AP's but not my Mikrotik.  WDS is enabled on the AP but I can getting Unicast Key exchange time out.  Any words of advice?

Jason

9
@remotelylocated wrote:

WDS is enabled on the AP but I can getting Unicast Key exchange time out.  Any words of advice?

Jason

I'd probably try using some different encryption types, starting with open, and working my way up. Make sure any propriatary Mikrotik stuff is disabled, like NV2.

1 Like