OK, I know that title is totally click bait but unlike all the bogus links out there I'm actually going to show you a really cool new feature in 15.2 that no one seems to know about that can actually help you generate more money from your overloaded PMP450 AP's.
Cambium quietly released a very powerful new feature in their 15.2 firmware called "SM prioritization". You can read up more on it in the user guide on page 7-223, but simply put, this feature allows you to granularly define air time utilization between SM's tagged either as low or high priority. This feature is a game changer for a few simple reasons.
Prior to this if you had an overloaded AP, reaching the maximum frame utilization, most of the clients will experience a spike in latency, jitter, and at worse packet loss. Assigning a CIR to specific clients doesn't really help the issue either because it doesn't take air time into account, so if you have a CIR on a client with poor snr/modulation, it will actually make issues worse.
Here are a few potential ways to use this on your AP's:
- Enable high priority on clients with good snr/modulation that want to pay you more $$$
- Designate lower airtime % to those clients with poor snr/modulation, freeing up valuable airtime
- Ensure custom plans get the bandwidth they need
- Ensure VoIP works well at all times for important, high paying clients
- Reduce tech support load by up-selling high priority access to clients that are sensitive to latency or reduced throughput
You'll want to use this tool judiciously though. Obviously you don't want to enable high priority service on a client that has poor snr/modulation as this would even further overload a strained AP. We've been trying this on some heavily loaded AP's with 50+ clients on them, with maybe around 5-10 high priority clients, and so far, the frame utilization has been the same, but the high priority clients no longer show the high and low latency hills and valleys during peak times, and the low priority clients seem to have exactly the same service as before without any further, noticeable degradation. And of course the higher paying clients are happy because things seem much more consistent and smooth at any given time of day.
To sum all this up, Cambium has given PMP450 operators yet another (FREE!) way to squeeze even more performance out of their PMP450 gear... and with auto contention slots coming very soon, we're excited to see just how far we can push these AP's!