i am currently running a 4 AP tower at 90deg using the ePMP 3000.
i have deployed ePMP force 300 SM to all clients and after 3 years have fianlly decided to stop troubleshooting the ethernet port failures and sudden LAN traffic stopping.
i want to replace the SM but since cambium APs do not have forward compatibility i guess i would have to stick with the “force 300”? which makes no sense considering they are “end of life” and have common issues of the ethernet ports failing documented.
HELP!!!
Hello @Allen_Pierson welcome to the Cambium forums!
Why not upgrade the AP’s on the tower to ePMP 4500 which supports backwards compatibility with the F300 SM’s, and then you can slowly swap to F4525 SM’s as needed?
well i would be open to doing that but after doing research in interest of purchasing F425’s , i’m seeing those have issues too lol
We’ve been actively upgrading our e3k AP’s to 4500’s and it’s been going great. We have almost 100 F4525 SM’s deployed. The new 5.9.2 firmware is working great and is very stable. You might want to try upgrading one sector to evaluate.
Hi Allen,
I echo your sentiment… not having compatibility with the previous generation of gear is disappointing and is a real wrench in the works for us too. I know we should “just upgrade all our APs” but that’s super expensive, and we also have many many month’s of -30 -40 -50 temps here, and it’s “critical emergencies only” when it comes to Tower climbing for half our year. So yeah, I really agree that it’s a handicap to moving forward. I can understand Cambium not perpetually supporting 2000 and 1000 series compatibility if needed, but the 3000 series was the current generation when the 4500’s came out, and to have not fully supported is kinda crazy to me. Certainly threw the brakes on for our plans too.
Anyway - about Ethernet issues, I don’t understand these reports. We’ve had a few ePMP which have died here and there, but we just don’t have routine Ethernet issues at all. We have hundreds of them with essentially zero reports of Ethernet issues. And we’ve had zero issues with 4525s either. Again - we’re not really buying many due to the lack of compatibility, but the ones we have bought are working fine.