Ever since I got bamboozled into deploying a WiMax basestation, I
have been skeptical of tree penetration hype.
We have been deploying Cambium 450 in 3.5 GHz / CBRS and it’s great,
but it doesn’t “penetrate” trees. OK, an SM within a mile can go
through 1 or 2 trees, depending on the size/density/type of tree.
And with the usual caveat that trees near the customer are more
problematic than trees in the middle of the path.
Some people say otherwise, but there were all sorts of glowing
testimonials for the WiMax equipment as well.
Maybe LTE has magic properties. I doubt it, but I haven’t tried it,
I don’t want to repeat the WiMax fiasco. So I could be wrong. But
when I’m wrong, usually it’s because I wasn’t pessimistic enough and
things are even worse than I feared. Only on rare occasions do I
expect a lion behind the door and there’s a beautiful lady. Usually
there’s 2 lions.
Certainly turning on CBRS made all our 3.5 GHz Cambium stuff work
better, we got several dB higher xmt power, and usually cleaner
spectrum. But the cleaner spectrum thing is only true until other
operators fire up their stuff in 3550-3650. Even if you get a PAL,
it’s not like nobody can use that frequency in the whole county.
The interference at the edge of your PAL protection zone should be
below some level that the SAS uses when authorizing nearby operators
to transmit. But that level isn’t -99 dBm.
LTE gear may be designed with better receiver sensitivity, that will
help if the noise floor is really really low. On the other hand,
does most LTE gear use the highest allowed EIRP? What about the
CPE? That was another problem with the WiMax stuff, the CPE was 3rd
party stuff that typically had kind of wimpy xmt power and not
particularly high antenna gain. Maybe that’s not true of LTE gear,
I haven’t looked into it. But pull out a Cambium 3 GHz 450b
high-gain SM spec sheet and compare to the LTE CPE.
*From:* AF <af-boun...@af.afmug.com> *On Behalf Of *Trey Scarborough
*Sent:* Sunday, September 13, 2020 4:43 PM
*To:* af@af.afmug.com
*Subject:* Re: [AFMUG] LTE vendors
Has anyone done a comparison or know of a whitepaper between LTE and
Cambium? I am mainly looking at tree penetration or lower DB signals
to actual throughput comparison. I have been told that LTE gets a
little better tree penetration but if that is at a low rate that
really doesn't help any.
On 9/12/2020 10:03 AM, Darin Steffl wrote:
It comes down to complexity. Ericsson, Nokia, etc are all
cellular brands and to run and manage those complex LTE
networks, you need full time engineers to manage, debug, and
optimize things.
Cambium is so easy, in comparison, there's very little extra
learning to do in order to get it running great. Ericsson LTE
probably would require months of training and needing to hire
someone just to run the gear or hire expensive consultants to do
it for you.
On Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 9:49 AM Kurt Fankhauser
<lists.wavel...@gmail.com <mailto:lists.wavel...@gmail.com>> wrote:
450m is the only way to do, especially if your already using
the 450 platform in other parts of your network, there is an
operator in my area with the Ericson system and they had a
ton of issues with getting it up and running, not even sure
if they ever got it all resolved.
On Fri, Sep 11, 2020 at 9:00 PM Sean Heskett
<af...@zirkel.us <mailto:af...@zirkel.us>> wrote:
Yup what josh said lol.
We tried the LTE thing and glad we switch to 450m...much
easier.
-Sean
On Fri, Sep 11, 2020 at 4:43 PM Josh Luthman
<j...@imaginenetworksllc.com
<mailto:j...@imaginenetworksllc.com>> wrote:
Having done one LTE vendor and 450m the only mistake
I made was not buying the 450m sooner.
Josh Luthman
24/7 Help Desk: 937-552-2340
Direct: 937-552-2343
1100 Wayne St
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On Fri, Sep 11, 2020 at 5:54 PM Adam Moffett
<dmmoff...@gmail.com <mailto:dmmoff...@gmail.com>>
wrote:
And yeah, 450m might be expensive, but so is all
the LTE stuff.
You'll max out the legal EIRP with 450m, and get
8x8 MIMO. I think
part of the magic with LTE is that it will
connect with ridiculously
low signal, but on a fixed system you probably
won't really want the
trashy signals anyway.
Cambium also has LTE for whatever it's worth.
The CBRS version
is supposed to be available relatively soon
(though I forget
precisely when).
I don't know if I state it as "fewer issues
since there is no
EPC", but definitely fewer complexities and
fewer things to worry
about. The connection from eNB to EPC has to be
/pristine/,
and the EPC comes with its own set of new
terminology and new
concepts to figure out.
On 9/11/2020 4:06 PM, Darin Steffl
wrote:
I have seen lots to people doing 450M in CBRS
stating coverage is nearly the same as LTE
but way better speeds
and triple the aggregate capacity due to
mu-mimo.
Way fewer issues too since there is no EPC. Just
straight layer 2 with no bullshit.
On Fri, Sep 11, 2020, 2:39 PM
David Coudron <david.coud...@advantenon.com
<mailto:david.coud...@advantenon.com>>
wrote:
We are looking at a new area to
expand out network that has a lot more
tree cover than
our current footprint. We are thinking
with the
combination of CBRS and LTE, that we
might be able to
offer better coverage than with
traditional fixed
wireless options. We have started
conversations with
the following vendors, wondering if
anyone has any hands
on experience with any of them and what
their
impressions were:
Blinq
Airspan
Baicells
Ericsson
The Ericsson equipment is in a class
by itself price wise, but the others are
similarly
priced, and somewhere around double the
price of PMP 450
stuff. Normally we would add more
tower sites for
better coverage, but this project will
need to be done
before the end of the year and building
towers isn’t an
option. We have good enough spread on
the towers that
we think we can do this with PMP 450
APs, but are
thinking we’d get even better coverage
out of LTE. Any
opinions on the reliability and the
manageability of the
four vendors above? Sorry for such an
open ended
question, but not sure what to ask to be
more
specific. We know that we will have
the LTE stuff to
deal with like access to an EPC and so
on, so not so
much worried about that as more the
manufacturers
themselves. Baicells concerns us as
they may get
lumped in with Huawei.
Thoughts?
Regards,
David Coudron
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