Need a 4x4 802.11ax AP

The 8x8 AP XV3-8 is overkill for most situations and is expensive. Why is there no 4x4 AP to occupy the middle ground? Something a little less expensive to compete with Cisco 9115ax.

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There is a 4x4 AP in the plans to be released later this year.

Where is this 4x4 AP that you spoke of???

@CA-Phillip , the 4x4 is a tri-radio SDR AP (2x2 2.4, 2x2 5, 4x4 5/6) and is planned for general availability first half of next year.

That’s quite a delay from what you said earlier. Why make an 8x8 to begin with? You have no product to compete with other vendors 4x4 APs. 8x8 is simply overkill and not needed at all. It has made us have to quit offering Cambium to customers as part of our WiFi0-as-a-service offering.

Hi, just want to ensure that you are aware that on the XV3-8 Wi-Fi 6 AP, you can split the one 8x8 radio into two 4x4 radios.

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@CA-Phillip which other APs were you comparing against? I’d like to understand why XV3-8 split into 4x4 mode did not meet your price/performance requirements.

Hi Kumar I’m not the OP and each market has different pricing structures but it’s a difficult sell for me to get customers to pay virtually 3x the price of a xv2-2 . I understand that it literally has 4x the chains of a xv2-2 and a bunch of additional features but at the end they also have budgets they have to squeeze projects in. A 4:4 would be a very good middle ground for smaller meeting rooms, cafeterias and the like. In general with other brands I’m better off installing 2 x 4:4 AP’s in a area to knock out problem areas than just relying on a single 8:8 in any case.

I said nothing about lack of performance. And how would splitting a radio change the price to meet price/performance? Your statement doesn’t make much sense. I guarantee 4x4 802.11ax APs outsell 8x8 802.11ax APs across other vendors. It really doesn’t make much sense that you brought an 8x8 AP to market. I deploy a lot of managed WiFi and we generally deploy 4x4 APs over 2x2 APs due to most of our customers doing voice and video. A 4x4 AP on a 20MHz channel will outperform a 2x2 AO on a 40MHz channel with the same PHY rate all day long. Fortinet 431F is MSRP $856 and the XV3 is $1160. Other vendors such as Extreme and Aruba APs become as cheap or cheaper with deal reg and discount. The Cambium E600 was a great AP at a MSRP of $419. Where is the natural replacement for the E600? Something in the MRSP $600 dollar range and 4x4 seems appropriate. As a company that offers WaaS, manages 1000s of APs, sells several other vendors solutions I do not understand this product roadmap.

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I think the XV3-8 (8x8 capable) was brought up here because you can split that 8x8 into two 4x4 5GHz band radios to go along with the 4x4 2.4G radio and a 1x1 dual-band dedicated scan radio. So you are getting three dedicated data 4x4 radios (two in the 5G band and one in the 2.4G band) as well as a dedicated scan radio which can cover both bands. BT is also in the XV3-8 but maybe that has no value for most deployments (at least now). The 4x4 vs. 2x2 gives 3dB more power so I would expect that you would require fewer XV3-8’s to cover a space vs XV2-2 (although it is a great AP and great value). You can use our WiFi Designer tool to do a rough site survey\coverage study (or if you have Ekahau, Air Magnet from Net Ally, or iBwave site survey tools you can choose the XV2-2, XV3-8, or any other Cambium AP). If you are ok with wifi 5 (802.11ac wave 2) you can consider the e600 which has 4x4 on the 5G band to go with 2x2 on the 2.4G band (it has two Ethernet ports, BT, USB)