Official gripe of AC wave2 products and direction of Cambium portfolio

Products ePMP
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I offer this only to help.  

1. I cannot deploy ePMP 3000 until some type of QOS is in the firmware.  I've already waited a long time for other basic features of this product.  It sits on my inventory shelves as I buy more ePMP 2000 and Force 200/180 subs. About 75% of my network cannot use 20Mhz channels or larger, which also makes this product unusable for us. This has taken too long.  

2. The Force 300 and PTP 550 latency is just not going to cut it.  Period.  

3. The PTP670, which is a modded PTP650 is a solid backhaul.  But the price point puts this older backhual into cheaper licensed backhaul territory.  It seems no new territory is being broken in this segment of Cambium's business in favor or the AC wave2 stuff, which again, I've highlighted as being poor or unfinished. It seems that R&D has been focusing on wifi based chipset instead of the proprietary Cambium chipset -may not have been a bad thing if ACwave 2 stuff worked, but hasn't for us thus far.  

I've been a primary Cambium user and I am the first to praise their products and give credit where due.  But, lately things seem to be rolling differently.  Like, lets make the products feature rich but put a back seat to performance and reliability -and in my case usablity.   I don't get why the focus was so high on forward and backward compatibility of the 3000 when you guys didn't even have QOS or 10Mhz channels available.  Cart before the horse in my opinion.  All of this while releasing new software like CNheat, advanced spectrum analyzer, other flavors of the 3000, the focus on transitioning other brands with "elevate", and expensive switches that are not rated for tower use.  All this stuff is doing in my opinion is pulling focus away from making great radios.  What's next, solar panels?  

I'm not an expert in what makes money for Cambium, I'm just a customer who remembers that Cambium used to wait to put out products that #1 worked great out of the box and had all the features you needed to build and grow a WISP.  Maybe other WISP's were asking for some of these products and services you've horizontally integrated into, but I never saw it on the idea's page or in the forums.  Meanwhile, there are actual ideas from customers that are ignored in the idea forum.  

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Nathan

Thanks for your comments. I want to address a few specific topics that you have highlighted below. At Cambium we really are trying to meet customer needs but it always boils down to meeting requests that make sense for a majority of the cusotmers and this is why some things just take time to stabilize and develop. There is always a limited amonut of R&D and even if it unlimited something just take a lot more time.

For ePMP3000, our focus really has been to get MUMIMO stabilized and the overall system working well. We are now spending all of our efforts to catch up on various features. Here are some highlights 

QOS is coming in as a beta software with release 4.4 in about a week for PMP. It will cook in beta for a bit with feeddback coming from our customer base and then we will put this into an ofiical release.

F300 products will all support ePTP mode which will improve latency considerably. Its in the works and coming soon.

A new subscriber soon to launch will support 5/10MHz. We just need to go back and evaluate whether we can do 10MHz on ePMP3000. In all honesty, this probably will not happen anytime soon.

Hope these updates are hepful for you. 

Thx

Sakid

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Thank you for the reply.  I eagerly await these changes. 

I think not having smaller channel sizes in the 3000 is a mistake.  What good is is MU-MIMO when you can't transmit cleanly in the channel?  In the real world 20Mhz only works in extreme rural areas.  In those areas, you can probably use 40Mhz channels to get capacity using legacy equipment.  But in many small towns, where capacity is needed and MU-MIMO would be a godsend, clean 20Mhz channels are rare in non-DFS channels.  I guess the solution here would be to migrate to the 450M platform, which I'm not above doing.  But if no 10Mhz is coming in 3000, just say it so we know.  Perhaps that is a limitation of the AC wave2 chipset?  I don't believe it is.  UBNT spec sheets say 10mhz channel sizes for the gen2 Prism AC are a thing.  Please consider real world scenarios is all I ask.  

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