What Speeds are you guys offering to Customers

Products PMP
1

Hello

I am about to change out my entire ubiquity network besides my Air fibres, all to cambium, i started out with the motorla canopy equipment which worked great for many years then moved to ubiquity, we have had bad luck on the AP side and SM side of their equipment. Lots of failure rates and low speeds, So we had purchased all new epmp 1000 aps sectors, 450i new 900 radios and 2.4mpm SM's. I have a rough idea of what i want to offer my customers, But i am just wondering what you guys feel is right to offer for speeds on the New cambium equipment. I can work with any frequency being very remote.

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated. I hear nothing but good things about the new cambium equipment so far and from using motorola all these years its time to switch back.

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Great to hear this kind of story.  I am sure there are plenty of opinions on what kind of service offerings work best, but in my experience this varies greatly depending on location, competition, rf conditions, range and innumerable other factors.  

So I would expect to see quite a few different answers get posted here, and we'd love to continue to see how your network is doing as you deploy more Cambium gear.

Welcome back!

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There are so many different variables to consider when offering service tiers and I started typing out some of the things to consider but just became overwhelmed quickly.

To give you an example, we have most of our PMP450 AP's using a 20MHz channel width and we try to install people with an SnR of 20dB or higher so we can have everyone running at mid/high modulation rates. We can easily offer a mix of 6/1, 9/1, and 19/1 service tiers and put 40-60 people on an AP before frame utilization starts to peak. Why did we choose those specific service tiers you might ask? Because they conform to various SM bandwidth license tiers for the PMP450 line, and on the low end (6/1) with the PMP100 line. In addition, we do some pretty advanced traffic shaping/QoS/DPI to ensure streaming content works properly on lower end tiers and/or legacy PMP100 equipment (or Ubiquiti Airmax for that matter). This allows us to squeeze more out of our entire network (AP's, BH's, upstream BW provider, etc) and provide a smoother customer experience (and make us more money cha-ching!).

If we had a greenfield deployment... no PMP100... or maybe all we were deploying was ePMP... our service tiers might be quite a bit different... most likely higher mbps tiers. Once you go down that road however, you have to make sure your overall sector modulation is quite high, and your oversubscription ratio will drop and you won't be able to put as many subs on each AP. Maybe you have less subs on each AP, but more revenue per sub because of higher tiers? Choosing your service tiers is a huge game of pros/cons/trade offs.

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I’ll throw in what is your cost per MB, your competition pricing and your data limit plan as factors. It’s easier to offer and sell 4mbit service with no data cap if your competition is dsl with data caps then it is to sell versus cable companies offering 8 meg for 19.95.

One thing i would say is under promise over deliver. Your going to have angrier subs if you offer 10 and can’t deliver it then if you offer 6 and later ramp then up to 8.

Tim

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We've been doing WISP stuff for almost a decade now. We started out with a lot of WiFi-based stuff, the original networks were SkyPilot 5.8 GHz 802.11a and Smart Bridges 802.11b (WISP that we purchased). We got into PMP-100 on 900 MHz, upgraded the 802.11b stuff to 802.11g Tranzeo equipment, bought an ISP with 2.4 GHz PMP-100 and 802.11g Ubiquiti gear, and did a couple hundred PMP-320 WiMAX customers. We're now rolling out PMP-450 everywhere we can, and I have to say, this stuff rocks.

Our network is constantly changing and we currently support everything I listed above except the Ubiquiti gear (but it works the same as Tranzeo anyway). Our marketing is designed for plans that basically work across the network.

Up to 5/1 Mbps with 50 GB or 100 GB

Up to 10/2 Mbps with 250 GB

"Max" - fastest speed on that platform, with 350 GB or 500 GB. On PMP-450 this is 25/5 Mbps.

Since this is the PMP-450 forum, I'll focus on how we provision that gear.

Unlike Eric, we do not use any third-party traffic shaping or packet inspection. The first WISP we bought made use of a NetEq, and another WISP I consult for does as well. They're pretty handy boxes, if you understand their limitations, configure them properly, and can fit it in with your network and budget. We use PPPoE for all of our customer connections, so that kind of screws up that tech anyway. Instead, we use two different mechanisms:

The first is bandwidth quotas, which let customers self-regulate their consumption. Plans are really priced according to usage. We did some analysis and concluded that the access speed doesn't matter to us as much as it used to. Of course, if everyone only uses their service at peak time this is doesn't work well, but it cuts down on serial heavy usage and is a nice source of income. My employer doesn't pay "that much" for Internet bandwidth, but the WISP I do consulting for is in the middle of nowhere and Internet is EXTREMELY expensive - they were losing money because their Internet bills were exceeding the revenue from subscribers. Implementing packages with quotas helped them deal with this issue immediately and get heavy users to pay their share (incidentally, also done via a NetEq - I guess the new software is pretty cool)

The second mechanism we use is the queuing features built into the PMP-450 gear itself. I highly recommend digging into the manual and figuring out the QoS section. This gear will provide a different rate to a subscriber in a burst of activity than on longer transfers. The basic idea is that this promotes responsive web-browsing and other intermittent applications, but keeps under control stuff like streaming video and file downloads.

On PMP-450, our actual profiles are set up like this:

5/1 Mbps package:

 - DL burst size: 24 MBytes

 - DL burst rate: 6 Mbps

 - DL sustained rate: 3.5 Mbps

 - UL burst size: 10 MBytes

 - UL burst rate: 1.5 Mbps

 - UL sustained rate: 768 Kbps

10/2 Mbps package:

 - DL burst size: 48 MBytes

 - DL burst rate: 12 Mbps

 - DL sustained rate: 9 Mbps

 - UL burst size: 20 MBytes

 - UL burst rate: 2.5 Mbps

 - UL sustained rate: 1.5 Mbps

25/5 Mbps package:

 - DL burst size: 96 MBytes

 - DL burst rate: 30 Mbps

 - DL sustained rate: 20 Mbps

 - UL burst size: 20 MBytes

 - UL burst rate: 6.5 Mbps

 - UL sustained rate: 4 mbps

The cool part about this approach is that we deliver an experience like a faster connection, but it actually uses less bandwidth long-term. Speed test results actually match the "burst rates" above, so anybody on the 10 Mbps plan actually sees 12 Mbps on a test. Cool huh? For the most part this applies to the whole experience. But certain apps, like NetFlix, are bandwidth-hungry and will just keep scaling up to use the ENTIRE pipe. Obviously this is an issue. Boxes like NetEQ and Sandvine DPI screw with the traffic of these apps enough to keep them under control. This is a low-tech approach that gives the same results while being application-agnostic.

We don't have any major congestion problems except on a couple APs with a lot of heavy users (one AP faces a subdivision with >50 subscribers on 10 and 25 Mbps plans). In response to congestion we actually clamped the sustained rate - 10 Mbps profile down from 9 to 7 Mbps sustained, 25 Mbps profile down from 20 to 10 Mbps sustained - and this has resolved complaints until we can put up the additional hardware to relieve congestion.

Our PMP-450 links are pretty well engineered. 95% of them run 8X/8X, good fresnel clearance, reflectors out the ass. Sketchy links go on another platform like 900 MHz PMP-100. Running poor links is a MAJOR hinderance to AP capacity, regardless of platform. Keeping up with AP capacity is probably the biggest challenge, but it's a lot easier with PMP-450.

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"95% of them run 8X/8X, good fresnel clearance, reflectors out the ass."

Iowa or somewhere in the desert?  Too many trees around here for good fresnel zone all the time.  It also seems to me that the 450SM should come WITH a Clip.  It's rare to see a 450 SM on our network without one or RD.

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Nope none of that. I wrote "good", not "perfect" ;) Our install habits have changed VERY much since the days of PMP-100 and 802.11a stuff - now all of our installers are trained in picking lines of sight and adding tower until the SNR and polarity mod rates etc look good. We used to just install based on RSSI. We put up a LOT more tower and poles now than we ever did before.

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could you perhaps explain us of show us those "reflectors out the ass"? did you shield the back of the sectors or???

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Just that every single SM is on a reflector dish (where applicable). AP antennas are a mix of Cambium and KP Performance

On 900 MHz PMP-450i we use KP  Performance dual-polarity yagis. They work extremely well and got the gear working to our expectations.

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Bursting is no longer a good way of serving a customer. Netflix and all streaming services first do a speedtest to see what they can send you. If you test at 25Mbps and then goes to 5Mbps then they get a horrible internet experience the rest of the stream. 

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Actually, when Netflix and other streaming services first became popular, this was indeed the case, and caused some issues. However, the algorithms by which they determine the capabilities of the pipe have gotten much more sophisticated, and bursting no longer creates an issue.  In the case of Netflix, they periodically reassign the stream data output, and will compensate should the burst bucket become exhausted during a session (i.e. during congestion).

An example of a study from Clemson University on this beavior (albeit from 2013) is here.

It would be great if other customers that have first-hand knowledge of this phenomenon would chime in with their experiences.

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