rebelwireless wrote:I doubt most have much pre-N gear in the field these days. We have a very small number out in remote, tiny repeater sites where the equipment is still working and the throughput to the couple clients meets their plan.
One issue with the AC gear is that it's about 70% more throughput in good conditions, but anything -65 or worse and the M gear is very close, -70 and the M gear actually does better. This is fine when you are doing micro-pops (most of our new deployments) but it's focusing on one aspect that maybe wasn't that big of an issue. Chris, as you point out, you can sell high speed plans on M gear if you plan well. I would have really loved to see some efforts to improve modulation in lower SNR like Cambium (which has a 5dBm+ advantage in SNR easily) and I suspect....(NDA warning) will be much better in the short term.
That's why I'm interested in Mimosa. Yes, more throughput is great in good signal areas, but I want to be able to offer high speed service at -75 (rather, at what would be -75 on a PowerBeam to a Rocket Sector). I've already seen that 1-3dB less on Cambium on the AP & CPE ends up being the same reported signal level. Using some modern MU-MIMO and beamstearing, and a better AC radio to start with, makes me optimistic.
I'm going to go back to the fact that a Cambium 802.11n solution is VERY close to ubiquiti's AC gear on raw throughput, but is a more stable system with more predictable performance.
I can't say enough good things about M series ubiquiti, especially XM boards. Price to performance is excellent, it's really opened a lot of doors for wISPs. But their AC gear is really underwhelming and if I'm honest, should just be coming on the market now as the firmware is just getting stable enough for confident deployment. I've had AC gear hanging since the first shipment to streakwave. I've had a pretty significant script cycling through and rebooting radios for most of that time to keep everything working during normal hours.
We have some ePMP running and aren't happy at all. May be that's due to only available DFS bands here. We see dfs events, we see gps failures and we see cpe dropouts with interference. And we don't see performance comparable to UBNT AC. The epmp sm is 13 db while the nanobeam 19 is 19. There alone you get the difference to make AC work better than 11n. We had a lot of sw problems while epmp evolves and some faulty SMs.
Remember back when UBNT M was new. It was crappy like hell. So don't expect UBNT gear to work (exclude the airfibers) the first 6 months from release. Take it as showcase/beta phase. The newer beta's work quite well and perform better than UBNT M and ePMP for sure. We use the Rocket PTMP with filtering. Replacing a ePMP 1 by 1 at a 13 db Omni we see much better results. Lower latency and higher bandwidth.
