I just watched the webinar and I have to say I am very disappointed in Cambiums continued licensing approach. The reason our company left Canopy in the first place and went with UBNT was cost and the lack of any licensing hassles. UBNT took over the market by going the opposite direction of Cambium and it appears you have not learned from that. Am I happy with UBNT? Not completely that's why we are looking at the epmp and recently started testing it. At this point I cannot say if I am even impressed with epmp as we haven't had it long enough to know. The first release of epmp scared me as far away from Cambium as I could get, but a couple years of a persistant salesmen finally got me to give it a 2nd try. If we would have had the ability to turn our UBNT sms into epmp SM's and let them all coexist on the same AP without paying a small fortune this would be a no brainer, but why pay 35 bucks per customer when a new module only costs 100 or so? And all ISP's know that "a couple of days downtime" to get licensing fixed on a down AP is not even remotely acceptable.
Our original plan was to use both UBNT and ePMP AP's on the same tower and it looks like we will have to continue that direction. Your licensing plan will keep us buying UBNT subscribers for a very long time to come, without it we might have started buying epmp sm's exclusively for all future customers.
I cannot be the only ISP that thinks the idea of swapping ALL customers to a new subsciber is absolutely insane!
I'm with you on part of this - the nickle and dime licensing has kept me from giving the 450 line even a try. On the other hand though, this is a one-time software cost to upgrade CPEs and save truck rolls.
For me, $35 is a steal if I can remotely install the software to save a truck roll. On our network we have subscribers that may be only a few miles from an AP but it may be a 30~40 mile driving trip between them. The drive time, gas, and replacement time far out-cost the difference between a $35 software license and a $120 CPE.
It would be sweet though if Cambium offered a get started license pack for free though, and then a per-device license after.
Gosh - my take on this is 180 degrees different from yours. Not that you're wrong necessarily from your perspective, but from my perspective - this is a wonderful announcement with a wonderful price point. Here is how I see it:
If we have 2,000 older clietns out there, spread across a bunch of towers, and if we want to convert all our towers to Cambium (which we do) it's a major problem. We either need to try to ''forklift'' everything the same day, or we need to have some migration strategy. If that strategy is to put up two different AP's and to duplicate the AP's, then that'll use twice the channels and will lead to self interference. It's all about mitigating interference, expecially self interference.
And, if I did put up a new sector and still ran the older sector to support the old customers with the idea of going and converting them all to Cambium SM's - that's not nearly just $100 per CPE. For us at least, that's also a truck roll, it's the cost of paying the installers to do it. Its the fact that the installer can't be out doing other productive work while they are busy doing upgrades - it's absolutely wasted time, and time-IS-money.
So - for me - if I'm given the two choices with 20 customer SM's...
1) Buy new SM's and send an installer to replace them. That's probably $2,500+ in hardware/shipping, it's probably more than a week to drive around and relace them - depending how rural and spread out those clients are. That's probably another $2,500 in labor costs, gas costs, supplies costs - waiting to get inside to change power supplies where needed, dealing with farm dogs, snow on the roof, etc, etc, etc.
2) Buy 20 Licenses - that's $630 and upgrade them all the same day, from the shop.
For me, I'd gladly pay Cambium $60,000 for licenses for our 2,000 existing non-Cambium CPE's. Easily the best deal ever, since that will otherwise cost us $200,000 in hardware and another $200,000 (likely about 3 man-years) to go change them all out. From my perspective, $60,000 to upgrade my whole network to ePMP without having to drive out... that's a no-brainer. :)
It would be sweet though if Cambium offered a get started license pack for free though, and then a per-device license after.
I thought the same thing - the ''optics'' of having to license the AP vs having to license each UBNT SM is just different. If this was ''$35 to license each UBNT with Cambium Software'' people would probably be clearer on the value. But then people would be saying - "Ugh - thats cumbersome! Why can't I just apply those licenses to the AP side?"
True, but the part about re-licensing an AP to fix one that is down is enough to steer me away from this. I live in lightning country, we lose AP's on a semi regular basis and we have towers that stretch a cross half the state. You know how customers are with down time, they don't like it. And if that time is extended because I need to get Cambium on the phone to relicense a new radio before I can even dispatch the tower crew that sounds nuts to me. UBNT is fine until 20 customers or so for us so we are not in dire need to do something about them. We just need an AP that can handle more customers.
Cost wise, it makes more sense to me to keep both brands on each tower. If I have a tower with 100 subscribers I'm looking at over 3 grand to make this change. For that kind of money I can lease AP space on that tower for a year. So for me at atleast this is not a solution, but a gimmick.
And - they have to be careful of this. When I first heard this, one of the questions I though was "will there be ANY performance difference between UBNT Elevated and ePMP SM's at all?"
If not, then what's to prevent new clients from simply buying a Cambium AP and continuing to purchase UBNT clients going forward? Hopefully Cambium didn't just help the competition solve all it's problems. :)
So, if you think about it - if there wasn't any license fees, then what you're basically really aksing is this. You expect to be able to buy a $200 Cambium AP (because you don't believe in the software licensing fee model - then you expect that an $200 AP LITE should also be unlimtied clietns I assume?) and then with that $200 AP, you expect to be able to upgrade all your UBNT SM's to ePMP ELEVATE with no licensing fee.
And, then going forward, why not keep buying UBNT SM's and just upgrade them for free to ePMP ELEVATE software? Ubiquiti would also love this business model, they wouldn't have to fix their software... they could just sell CPE's like they were going out of style. :)
So - from my perspective, this is both A) a really good value, and B) the only way Cambium can suppor the business model. At the very least, there needs to be an incentive going forward for people to purchase Cambium SM's - instead of simply purchasing surplus UBNT SM's and putting them on a Cambium AP for free.
True, but the part about re-licensing an AP to fix one that is down is enough to steer me away from this.
Cost wise, it makes more sense to me to keep both brands on each tower. If I have a tower with 100 subscribers I'm looking at over 3 grand to make this change.
Well, Cambium did say during the Webinar that they'd re-think the deadAP license issue, and would have an 'honor system' type of AP re-licensing to make it quicker. Actually, I was VERY impressed by how quickly they made that decision... right there and then, when presented with a customer issue that hadn't occured to them, they made a customer-based corporate policy decision. Awesome. :)
Certainly I'd think you could dispatch the crew with new hardare anyway and hang the new AP in place, and it can apply an Elevate License once its on the tower I would think - so this probably woudln't slow down a lightning repair much in most cases.
Or, if it was me, if there was going to be a day long time issue, I'd spend the $300 or $600 to license a new AP and get it up ASAP. Then once that was done, I'd then worry about asking Cambium about the license from the dead AP after the fact.
However, as I mentioned before - I'll grant that the 'optics' of any per-sm license on the AP is odd looking. If it was a $35 per CPE license applied into each CPE, that would probably feel more normal and more like a per-upgraded-ubnt-SM fee.
So realisitically - I like the simplicity of lthe AP method. It still is licensing each upgrade UBNT-CPE, but those licenses are stored in the AP. Of course, if they did apply the License into each SM, then the flipside question would be asked by everyone... "OK, I've licensed a Rocket SM - what happens when it dies and I replace it with a Cambium SM?" WIth the license in the AP, that license ''seat'' becomes immediately available to a new Elevate subscriber and is not locked or lost in an old UBNT SM.
And yes - if your UBNT network is working well for you, then there's no need to upgrade anything. This ELEVATE solution is built for someone who sees a value in migrating from UBNT to ePMP, and needs the scalability or frequency reuse or co-location ability of Cambium. However - "Not broke, don't fix!" :)
Few things to consider on the ePMP HW vs elevate SM performance. As mentioned on the webinar, ePMP HW does have advantages across the board from RF shielding, esd protection, cold boot up circuitry. Furthermore, things like Tx power accuracy, negative power table for automatic transmit power control, Rx sensitivity accuracy all come into play when you have an ePMP SM hardware. When you have an ePMP elevate SM, you get the benefits of the system sw performance but miss out on some of the hardware nuances. This is even more the case when comparing to older XM vs newer ePMP models such as F180/200.
Compared to the $675,000 + probably close to that in labor and other expenses that it would take to swap all those customers for Force 200's, that's really, really cheap.
I can't believe any one thinks this should be free.
You do run a business right?? Do you give things away? I bet not.
$35 is a far cry from a new radio and service call/truck roll.
The idea is you can migrate with this, without that additional cost. I love it. I don't like th AP licenses though, and would have MUCH preferred a CPE license. But, I'm not sure how you could do mass upgrades with that method like I think you can with the AP license model.
Luckily, our new sites are all epmp, and only some are mixed CPE's with UBNT AP's. This is an easy way to save a lot of money for us. and TIME.
When you have thousands of customers migrating is never really an option. You can add to your existing infrasctucture but converting all the ubnts to a temporary epmp with the plan to eventually swap them all to real epmp sm's is just not economical.
We will still add epmp ap's to our towers, but 90 towers won't happen over night and we still need to install new customers so lots of ubnt sm's will need to be ordered. Which is fine that's how we've always done it. We still have a large network of Canopy 100 series in operation. If a customer does not need faster bandwidth and is working fine why change them out?
There are good and bad points about doing the licenses either way. Like you said, it simplifies doing mass upgrades - if they used a CPE license, there would either have to be some method of entering the key before the upgrade, some kind of trial mode where it ran for a limited amount of time, or somehow limit functionality until the key is entered that would still let you access it remotely (like say, disable the ethernet port). All of those solutions have problems... plus it's a lot more keys to deal with - instead of one key on an AP with 30 SMs, you'd have to generate and enter 30 individual keys for each SM.
The biggest advantage to do CPE licenses, that I can see would be that it would then essentially be a normal ePMP SM that you could connect to any sector. But an AP license does have the advantage that if an elevated SM dies, you can replace it with a different one without losing the license... of course at that point it would most likely get replaced with a real Cambium SM anyway, so that may not be too useful.
I love it. I don't like th AP licenses though, and would have MUCH preferred a CPE license. But, I'm not sure how you could do mass upgrades with that method like I think you can with the AP license model.
That's kinda what I think too. If their licenseing model was a per-CPE model, there wouldn't be the same ''feeling'' that people have about another Cambium AP licensing thing. However - this IS really a CPE licenese model, it's just that the CPE licenses are applied into the AP.
SO, that's how we're looking at it... we need to license each Elevated CPE (for $35 or $31.50) and that's very fair. And to simplify things, we can apply those licenses into the AP, rather than having to put them 1 at a time into each CPE's. Given the posisble complications with installing 20 licenses into each of 20 different CPE's, the idea of applying the CPE licences into the AP is probably the most convenient and the least problematic solution. :)
This could be a really good opportunity for competition in the market but as always the licensing sceheme killed it.
With these license prices, it is a no go for us.
Swapping 6000 customers will cost 189000 USD + Basestation Pricing.
@This is where you need to discuss matters with your Regional Sales Manager @ Cambium, if you do not have a relationship with them yet I would advise to do so. Talking to your disto is one thing, speaking to the Rep is another.
That sort of quantity I am positive they would come to a better price based on volume over time.
True, but the part about re-licensing an AP to fix one that is down is enough to steer me away from this. I live in lightning country, we lose AP's on a semi regular basis and we have towers that stretch a cross half the state. You know how customers are with down time, they don't like it. And if that time is extended because I need to get Cambium on the phone to relicense a new radio before I can even dispatch the tower crew that sounds nuts to me. UBNT is fine until 20 customers or so for us so we are not in dire need to do something about them. We just need an AP that can handle more customers.
Cost wise, it makes more sense to me to keep both brands on each tower. If I have a tower with 100 subscribers I'm looking at over 3 grand to make this change. For that kind of money I can lease AP space on that tower for a year. So for me at atleast this is not a solution, but a gimmick.
I'd imagine you keep extra APs on hand if you get so much lightning trouble, same with SMs. stock some extra license. the purpose of this is not to keep replacing UBNT hardware with UBNT hardware. its to move to epmp faster and less upfront. If your affected by lightning so much, that would mean your CPEs are also being hit frequently, if thats the case, your license needs will decrease over time as you use epmp gear to replace the old stuff. (which installed properly, tend to fail far less frequently, so personally, Id still advise getting EPMP hardware as you go) Cambium can transfer your license to other APs if one fails, that was discussed in the webinar.
Compared to the $675,000 + probably close to that in labor and other expenses that it would take to swap all those customers for Force 200's, that's really, really cheap.
You can buy 2000+ CPEs for $189000 from Cambium.
or 4000+ CPEs from UBNT. All brand new.
35$ per license is a joke for WISPs in 3rd world countries which is the main area where %90 of UBNT equipment is installed.