Last month New Zealand’s Radio Spectrum Managers extended the 60GHz channels, opening up 57-71GHz at an EIRP of 55dBm with antenna larger than 30dBm gain.
Will the existing cnWave product line up (more specifically the v3000s) support these higher channels in the future, and if so when might we expect this?
Would love to try and push the distance on these PTP links as far as possible while maintaining >1G during moderate rain conditions.
I’ll let someone from the product team respond, but I want to mention that supporting higher frequencies in the band won’t necessarily provide longer range. Channels 1, 3, and 4 outperform 2 because channel 2 has the highest oxygen absorption. It may seem like going higher in frequency increases range, but the free space loss increases as a function of not only distance, but also frequency. Although channels 3 and 4 give greater range than channel 2, you don’t continue gaining range with higher frequencies.
It’s my understanding that 60GHz channels are unique in this fashion due to the larger loss decreases with higher frequencies from oxygen absorption compared to the lower loss increases of FSPL. Where the difference in FSPL is only ~1.1dBm between 60GHz and 68GHz but sees a decrease in loss of ~12dBm per KM due to lower oxygen absorption rates, meaning further distances should be achievable at these higher frequencies. Of course there is a limit to this where FSPL affects it more which appears to be around 70GHz, but channels between 65-71GHz should outperform 59-64GHz.
I’m hoping Australia’s ACMA is able to open up the 60GHz band; we can’t do Channel Bonding and only have access to Channel 2 which suffers the most from Oxygen Absolution… which affects most of Australia due to our proximity to the equator.
Based on this marketing (cnWave 60 GHz Fixed Wireless - Cambium Networks) under channel bonding, it appears that channels 5,6,12,13 might be on the road map for the future. Can a Cambium rep confirm this please? and if so when might we see such features?
The current cnWave 60 GHz platform supports channels 1-4. The 802.11ay chipset and therefore the cnWave 60GHz hardware does not support going beyond this.
Rain is more of an attenuator than oxygen (channel 4 oxygen attenuation is only around 4-5dB/km) while rain can be 10-20dB+/km so ultimately going to channel 5 or 6 won’t help all that much - unless you plan to have a lower frequency back up such as 5GHz in mind. Then you can push things much further because at least you have the back up.
The comparison is obviously ubiquiti with their channel 5&6 support but I think the more important thing to look at is that they are using narrow beam APs and all parabolic CPE to get most of this range reliably, and then a 5Ghz fallback when that fails. This works if you’re ok with a 3 9’s model and then a dramatically worse failover.
I’m sort of mixed on this (I have cnwave and ubiquiti and others deployed) because there are downsides to those upper channels. They can product noise that reaches further in nice weather for instance, and they do attentuate in rain just as much so in a downpour channel 6 is about 10% better than channel 1.
My customers don’t really want to go from 1G to 50M and my traffic shaping kit doesn’t want to make a change like that either 
What I would like to see is something like a V3000 able to do channels 5 & 6 that is dual polarity/dual link. if asking for the moon, a ‘V7000’ (for 7.2Gbps…) that can dual link a bonded channel 5+6 (ie, channel 13) in each polarity to get ~7Gbps in a PTP shot so we can get some slightly longer links that hold modulation better to bridge back across too many hops. It would only need to be PTP IMO because that’s where I see the value in it. bridging mesh zones or providing high capacity shortcuts back.
Not to hijack too much, but I’d much rather see a v1000+ radio that is barely more expensive that had a PoE out port to take an epmp radio and configuration for failover across that. We could stretch out our v1000 range an extra 20-30% if we could easily bolt on another backup radio AND we could offer that as a failover option hitting a different tower. Just have that backup port GRE/tunnel back to the E2E controller over ipv4 on the epmp side or something.
Point is, there are advantages to using the lower bands without some of the pitfalls of the higher bands, like reduced self noise for example. helping us prop-up slightly over spec links and drive a redundancy plan for businesses would better suit my outlook.