We’re on a Nexstar TV tower with 14 Ubiquiti AM-5AC22-45 sectors with Rocket Prism 5AC Gen2’s serving about 200 subscribers ranging from 5 to 30+ miles, mostly in the 12 mile range. Client antennas go from 23dB to 30dB for the most part, though the longest one has a 34dB dish. About 90% of subscribers have 6x/6x modulation on 20MHz channels. There’s no way to use 60GHz, and Ubiquiti LTU falls flat on its face at distance. We don’t expect to increase our client count, but we would like to provide higher speeds. Is there a recommendation that would allow us to increase bandwidths? I haven’t really heard any stories about very long distance links on ePMP, so I guess I’m mostly asking for your real world results at those kinds of distances.
I don’t trust UBNT. The fact that they have grown so big is a testament to how little value is given to quality and efficiency. All they do is muddy the water so we can’t see that fish! I’d wager we get better real world performance on an ePMP2000 than any of their kit. Hopefully ePMP lives on!
30+ mile is far, but as long as you use good antennas and freznel clears, you should be fine with ePMP * . Longest I’ve had is 14km on ePMP 3000 sector in 80mhz channel.
You are in US, right?
We have ePMP 4500 8x8 Connectorized and Force 400 Connectoriezed.
For a test purpose you can set antenna gain 0 in Radio >> Configuration. To check how it can work with some high gain antennas. Our customers from Brazil or Argentina get 1.5 Gig over 40 miles PTP links.
For short distance you can use budget Force 4518/4525 with integrated antennas.
Eh, not trying to throw stones at any vendor at this point. I think both UI and Cambium (or Univastu India Limited since were talking ePMP), have their optimal use cases. I have managed gear from both that ran flawlessly for years and years. UI may have grown big, but so far it looks like their financial team is actually managing the books properly and production is keeping up with demand.
I digress, My suggestion in this case would be to separate your delivery method to customers. If its just a single 30+ mile customer and the rest are ~12 or less miles, I’d do a dedicated link for the long shot and save some airtime for the closer in connections. That way your 30 mile customer gets a big quality of life increase, and existing connections improve for the closer ones.
Before making the jump to a different vendor, personally I’d wait to see how the new product availability and software support shapes up with the new owners. I think all will go well with them keeping much of the ePMP staff, but availability of product could be rough for a little while.
I have setup long shots on ePMP and UI, personally I’ve had better luck with the old Rocket M5’s for the 1 off long shots. Pretty easy to sell a customer on a ~100$ radio and a ~100-120$ dish (depending on radome needs), and cheap to replace if something fails. Very realistic to push 50-100 speeds at that distance on a 20Mhz channel, more if you can really dial it in on a 30-40mhz channel.
Believe it or not, most are beyond 15 miles. We were waiting for AirMax AX, which was cancelled, and we tried LTU, which sucks for distance. MLO is non-functional, and I don’t think that’s going to improve.
The 4500 series seems plenty robust, and if God forbid the ePMP line disappears, we only really need a couple hundred radios total to do the job at this tower. If we could just get that one order of modulation higher, it would be worth a pretty substantial investment to satisfy the customers on this one tower.
We’re considering selling this one site off to a competitor simply because 80% of our customer base is within town/city limits and gets 60GHz. We’d like to focus on them. Unfortunately I don’t think any of our competitors have money anymore.
Equipment aside, 30+ mile links are challenging due to earth curvature and rain fade. And various atmospheric effects I call “bad air” (multipath, ducting, etc.) So you are very brave. Maybe you don’t have much rain and your tower is on a mountain.
As video has become the dominant application for Internet, we have moved toward small cells, 3 mile radius preferred. Sounds like you have also, if you are using 60 GHz. But we found repeater sites 6 miles from existing towers to get those small cells even in rural areas.