I keep hearing about support for Canopy equipment coming to the CNS - anybody hear the same? Some dates possibly?
I believe they intend to support all Cambium devices at some point. I hear C3VoIP integration is coming as well which will be nice because we are excited for the new 200 series.
I think part of the problem for Canopy is they already have Wireless Manager, which is not free. Canopy/PTP/WM is the enterprise side, CNS and ePMP is obviously the cheaper solution. I think Cambium is becoming very well rounded in the market.
Anyway.. I would like to see full integration, plus: RADIUS, LinkPlanner, Canopy monitoring and upgrading, everything in one dashboard would be really sweet.
Yes I've heard that stuff as well. The problem with WM is I've also heard it's got a limited life span. Not surprising since its usefulness is extremely limited and it's FAR from user-friendly. We've had to build so many custom tools to compensate for the things it DOESN'T do that we don't have any staff loading it anymore and cannot justify putting any more money into it.
I agree full integration of everything would be awesome. That's what we were sort of hoping for when Prizm was retired. We keep hearing that CNS is supposed to be this solution, but so far they're whispers in the wind... I heard 2014Q4 a few times but there are no announcements or anything on the website.
Regarding the C3VoIP 200 boxes, they do look pretty cool on paper. Cambium seems to have done a good job listening to their market by adding a non-PoE version as standardization is very important. However, I'm not sure if they're listening regarding management interfaces. I got my paws on some 150s from our VAR and sent them back because they were so bad. Hopefully the 200s are useable.
We've been using Canopy for over 10 years. Never ran BAM, Prizm or WM. I run Cacti to monitor stuff. And CNUT to update radios. That's pretty much it.
If they redesign CNS to look like the new ePMP GUI, I think it will be much more usable. There's nothing wrong with functionality now, I just don't like the look of it. But that's just me.
Give it some time, I think they will get it done.
And Ray sent me a C3-200P. It is awesome, IMO. There's more features that we'll probably ever use. They really put some thought and effort into it.
We've had Canopy for about 8 years, and rolled out Prizm with BAM in about 2007. Prizm was a great product that did everything we wanted, but WM put us several steps back. Today we run slightly over 1000 PMP-100, -320, and -450 SMs with a home-brewed FreeRADIUS getup and a pile of internal tools I wound up writing. We were using WM initially for statistics monitoring, but with the high cost of operating it and massive problems we have (which Support has never been able to address), it's not really doing anything for us except using power.
Basically, we have to make a budget decision to either go completely with home-brew stuff, which will amount to using Cacti and CNUT, tied together into a fancy UI, or wait for The Next Silver Bullet That Will Solve All Of Our Problems (TM). We have no problems paying for something that works for us and will save us time - especially if I don't have to maintain it! - but I gotta know if it exists in the first place.
Is the C3-200P still DD-WRT based with the weird Google Translate interface? My biggest problems with the C3-150 were that there was no documentation on how to do mass-provisioning, nor did it seem to support separate VoIP and Internet services.
CNS is based on the Wireless Adviser thing they were working on previously. There is/was also the WISP Toolbox that Vernon Tindell wrote up. I would like to see CNS do RADIUS (not only for Cambium, but other pieces of our network that can use it), plus monitoring and software updates for Canopy radios. I would even pay a yearly support license if it did all that.
Anyway, the C3-VoIP. I have not used the 150. And I have only this one demo 200P unit. So I'm not sure what you mean about the Google Translate. Maybe that's a 150 thing only? The 200 does look like it's running modified DD-WRT under the hood, but DD-WRT doesn't do voice, so they must've added that themselves. Actually, I know which OEM vendor they're using, but I probably shouldn't talk about that. What I can say is that there are a TON of networking features in the 200 series. I believe you can put the voice onto a separate VLAN on the WAN interface. There are WAN connection groups. I haven't messed with it too much yet though.
I'm not sure about the provisioning. When they launch the product, I agree, it needs documentation.