The cnPilot E500 has a second ethernet port for auxilliary connections and in addition to bridging traffic, it can also power up another device that is capable of Power-over-Ethernet, over this port. The included PoE injector on the E500 provides it enough power to drive itself, while providing 12.9W (802.3AF) to another device connected on its eth2 port, no separate power injector is required.
This PoE-out can be used to power both devices that use Cambiums PoE (such as the ePMP1000), or devices that use standard 802.3af (security cameras etc). The administrator can select either of the two modes while enabling poe-out on the auxiliary port:
Two of the many use-cases of the daisy-chaining are:
- An E500 is co-located on a pole with a security camera, the daisy-chained POE-out helps avoid a second cable run up the tower.
- An E500 is providing WiFi service, while using an ePMP or PMP Subscriber Module for backhauling the traffic. Both devices colocated on the same pole/tower. The daisy-chaining allows simpler wiring with one cable from the poe-injector to the device.
While the ePMP1000 Hotspot also supports PoE-out, the two significant advantages the E500 brings over it are:
- the ePMP1000 only supports Cambium-POE, the E500 can do both Cambium and 802.3AF allowing a much wider range of devices that could be daisy-chained
- the wired ports are Gigabit, allowing higher throughput (versus 100Mbps on the ePMP1000 Hotspot)