End of the Road?

[dougncbp]

Well, it seems that Ubiquiti has stopped making several products that we still have in use. The Rocket M9 AP's are gone from all sources that I can find, and we lost two on a tower last week in a lightning strike. So one more lightning strike and we are done with the 900Mhz service on that tower. That was the last two spares that we had on-hand.

It also seems the other companies that made 900MHz gear have also abandoned that market. And now I hear that UI might get out of the 2.4GHz arena too. I got the last three in-stock Rocket M2's from a distributor yesterday. I hope that gear will last a little longer than the M9's, since they are nowhere to be found now.

I know, adapt or die. But we are a very small operation and cash flow doesn't make for extra funds for major upgrades. We picked the 2.4GHz band for most of our locations for a compromise between speed and tree penetration. I would have loved to use 5GHz gear, but it does even worse through trees at low power.

So what are other small operations doing? Ubiquiti made it possible for smaller operators to get tower gear and CPE at very low prices. It seems like that is going away now...

Doug

[sakita]

We're not a service provider but there are similar needs to be met: bandwidth and reliability at an appropriate price point.

It doesn't surprise me that they would be getting out of the 915 band: they probably haven't been selling well so probably not worth it for the company (check the manufacture date and I'll bet some of what was in stock recently wasn't "fresh"). Also, despite the benefits of penetration, the maximum throughput just isn't what most people would consider acceptable for home internet service (although anything is better than nothing if that's all you can make work). The 915 band will mostly end up being SCADA, LoRA, and similar low bandwidth uses unless someone decides to 'own' the market with a narrow beamwidth option that can deliver useful bandwidth (although probably not able to meet the current "broadband" definition).

As for 2.4 GHZ, we just bought some 2.4Ghz AC Nanobeam radios (NBE-2AC-13) - these have a test date of April 2020. In this case they are specifically being used in a location that has a little bit of tree interference so 5.8GHz is not being used. Hopefully they continue making 2.4GHz product because it is a useful option to have.