Cambium 450i 900Mhz micro-review

[rebelwireless]

We recently demo'd some Cambium 450i 900Mhz. We were hoping for a solution to get through the few trees that seem to block so many customers from our 5Ghz service.

Cutting right to the chase. It's good, but not good enough. It's main advantage is the ability to connect with partial modulation, aka, 1/4BPSK or 1/4QAM. Giving 3Mbps where nothing else will.

In practice, it's outperforming ubiquiti 900Mhz get by about 1 full modulation with good '5Ghz' LoS. It's staying connected and offering 3Mbps where ubiquiti wont for lack of lower modulation options when the trees are somewhat thick. There is practically no way to get true fresnel-safe LoS with 900Mhz so I'm just using 'intuition' and 5Ghz guidelines for best effect...

So, even though it outperforms it, I can't really deliver more than about 6Mbps in the conditions I need. For the price, ubiquiti 5Ghz and the micro-pop model is faster, and cheaper.

We are returning the kit unfortunately. 6Mbps just isn't enough to compete, and the heafty expense blows it right out of the water.

We have a very-typical noise environment for 900Mhz, and the test site is well elevated to try to get as much clean fresnel zone (iow, the earth isn't in the 1st fresnel) as possible.

[sirhc]

Thanks for posting the review, informative.