What's Your ePMP 3000 Experience So Far?

Trying to get more info on whether the ePMP 3000 line is good so far and what the real world customer end speeds have been. 

I would say the best success so far is in a greenfield deployments using the 3000 with Force 300-25 clients in very simple configurations... no PPPoE, no VLAN's, No NAT, no QoS... just keep it as simple as possible. Firmware updates are coming quickly to address a lot of issues along with adding features and performance... everything is getting better and better.

Legacy 1000/2000 support is still in private beta and will be released very soon. Forward support (F300 client to ePMP 1000/2000 AP) is still private beta and very alpha and will be some time before release.

With not optimal MU-MIMO groupings people are reporting around 200mbps aggregate at the AP using a 20MHz width. With optimal MU-MIMO groupings people are reporting around 250mbps aggregate at the AP using a 20MHz width.

I'd say that if you can stick to what I mentioned (ePMP 3000 w/F300-25 clients) and make it as simple as possible, and your clients are somewhat understanding, AND you run newest betas AND you're somewhat adventurous...  then go for it!

While firmware progress is coming along quickly, it's still very much a diamond in the rough.

2 Likes

Hi Eric,

Thank you very much for your valuable feedback as always. I'll definitely look at ordering a few units to test.

- KM

Right now we have (4) F300-16's connected to a 3k AP. One SM is in use at my house. The kids play first person shooter games with no problems. All video aps work fine. We use managment and data VLANs, and so far no issues with anything. Running 4.3.1-rc21 on all equipment. 

The only thing I have seen to be an issue is SM's will not register to AP unless they have an RSSI in the mid to low 60's.  I programmed each SM in a room that had window view to the tower they were connecting to. -None- of the 4 would connect to the tower laying on the desk with an RSSI in the low 70's. N series units aways connect to to the tower laying in the same spot. No matter how long I left them, SM's would not connect. I would get an error message saying something like "unit time out" or something like that in the wireless monitor tab. Wireless tab would also constantly show "registering", but they never registered. I would have to get the signal close to a 60 before SM's would register/connect. SM's would then connect and stay connected into the 70's to around an 80. 

As far as real world speeds. One location was downloading something for around 5 minutes and averaging around 94Mbps while watching Netflix on a smart TV. They have one pc that is hard wired to a SOHO router, so I am sure it was that pc. The router only has 100Mbps ports, so I think it could have downloaded at a higher rate with 1g ports. Another location was watching netflix/hulu/some kind of video ap. MU-MIMO actually kicked in during that time with MU-MIMO peaks around 20Mbps. That was pretty cool to see MU-MIMO kick in (in the real world) without having to run dual SM speedtests in the GUI. 

The GUI will show an upload speedtest of 35Mbps. We can never get more than 27Mbps of upload with any speedtest site/ap (speedtest.net, speakeasy, xfinity, etc). I am sure this will get better as platform evolves.

Also, all SM's so far are within 0.25 miles of tower. We will be putting some up between 1-2 miles asap to test as well. Anxious to see those results, but have other work and jobs lined up for this week. 

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Thanks CWB!

I’ll be putting most out for less than a mile. Hopefully I get good results as well. I understand that it’s brand new and rough around the edges.


@CWB wrote:

Right now we have (4) F300-16's connected to a 3k AP. One SM is in use at my house. The kids play first person shooter games with no problems. All video aps work fine. We use managment and data VLANs, and so far no issues with anything. Running 4.3.1-rc21 on all equipment. 

The only thing I have seen to be an issue is SM's will not register to AP unless they have an RSSI in the mid to low 60's.  I programmed each SM in a room that had window view to the tower they were connecting to. -None- of the 4 would connect to the tower laying on the desk with an RSSI in the low 70's. N series units aways connect to to the tower laying in the same spot. No matter how long I left them, SM's would not connect. I would get an error message saying something like "unit time out" or something like that in the wireless monitor tab. Wireless tab would also constantly show "registering", but they never registered. I would have to get the signal close to a 60 before SM's would register/connect. SM's would then connect and stay connected into the 70's to around an 80. 

As far as real world speeds. One location was downloading something for around 5 minutes and averaging around 94Mbps while watching Netflix on a smart TV. They have one pc that is hard wired to a SOHO router, so I am sure it was that pc. The router only has 100Mbps ports, so I think it could have downloaded at a higher rate with 1g ports. Another location was watching netflix/hulu/some kind of video ap. MU-MIMO actually kicked in during that time with MU-MIMO peaks around 20Mbps. That was pretty cool to see MU-MIMO kick in (in the real world) without having to run dual SM speedtests in the GUI. 

The GUI will show an upload speedtest of 35Mbps. We can never get more than 27Mbps of upload with any speedtest site/ap (speedtest.net, speakeasy, xfinity, etc). I am sure this will get better as platform evolves.

Also, all SM's so far are within 0.25 miles of tower. We will be putting some up between 1-2 miles asap to test as well. Anxious to see those results, but have other work and jobs lined up for this week. 


For RSSI setting, in the SM we have a default threshold that says not to allow a SM to connect with less than "x" RSSI levels. Could you please check that value?

Sakid


@Sakid Ahmed wrote:


For RSSI setting, in the SM we have a default threshold that says not to allow a SM to connect with less than "x" RSSI levels. Could you please check that value?

Sakid


Was the first thing I checked..."Network entry RSSI Threshold -90". Programmed a F180 and F190 for install today. One of them connected at a -77 from same desk top to same tower. It is not a setting in the SM.