I seen many references to the fact that Ubiquiti gear (running standard Ubiquiti F/W) don't play well while in close proximity , and that ideally you shoudl swap all sectors on a tower at the same time. However, we have some towers which get backhaul via Rocket M5 and Rocket dishes (which cant be switched yet using Elevate) so I was wondering just what the nature of the problem, can it be mitigated by a channels seperated by a significant guardband, is and which is affected most in an adverse way, is it the ePmP which suffes from the Ubiquiti or the other way round?
You should be fine as long as you can get a decent sized guard band (and ideally as much physical seperation as possible). Even if you're running ePMP for everything, it's likely that you're not going to be able to sync your backhauls and sectors anyway. In my experience, colocating ePMP sectors with UBNT sectors isn't really any worse than colocating UBNT sectors with more UBNT sectors - it's just that if they're all ePMP, and everything is synced, it will be much better.
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the root of the problem is receiver saturation/co-band noise.
guardbands help, but if you've got a device getting -15 db , its the equivalent of someone screaming in your ear. sure if you listen carefully, you can hear someone else faintly talking, but its hard to understand.
careful antenna placement, selection and keep a tab on how much power you are using.... FULL power isn't always the right thing to do, and during a move like this you could see benefit from taking a few points off the top if you are noticing issues while changing vendors.
UBNT gear has been self pleagued by this issue for as long as i can remember, If you've every tried to co-locate 2 UBNT 2.4 radios, and they've both been busy, you'll notice poor uplink performance the crazy uplink RSSI to achieve clean stable operation. while we were fighting the problem, it seemed we had to keep at CPES registered better than 62 or 63 for any resemblance of good performance. the cambium APs when synced., you can run much weaker uplinks without any issues. (noise floor permitting) my personal home connection wasn't at all possible until we switched to cambium, my downlink RSSI is -76, and up is -78 according to the AP. i get 20 to 25 mbps downlink, and 3 mpbs up now (75/25 split with GPS in a 10mhz channel, APTC target power at -65). UBNT wouldn't hold a ping here.
epmp1000 gear isn't anymore or less effected by this issue when it is not synced than UBNT, or when you mixed vendors. after you have sync active, you'll see a substantial improvement on your uplink performance, which translate to better end user experience. so, inshort when you read a post about the ill effects of mixing vendors, its more so interference to impeding your benift of the change, so don't wate anytime getting the swap done so you can look like the good guy to your subs ;)
the point of GPS sync is to do 2 things, re-use channels, and end co-band noise for gear that is stacked ontop of either.
another note: when possible, seperate your backhauls away from your multipoint when you are able to avoid that problem.
and last note, the epmp2000 was designed specifically for co-band noise / receiver saturation. as long as you don't overlap channels, and your using epmp2000 you have nothing to worry about and no negative effects of what is discribed above.
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