Sorry for the very slow reply. We have been putting up towers like
crazy trying to stay ahead of the weather. Here are some things we
have found that in our opinion, moved us toward a Blinq/LTE decision:
1. What has been said in this thread about the complexity of LTE is
absolutely true. EPCs, Software maintenance agreements, complex
tower designs, and expensive equipment, are all the norm with LTE.
Very frustrating. What we found with Blinq is a relief in some of
these frustration points:
1. An option for an embedded EPC. Still a little more setup than
5 GHz type systems, but not really any more difficult than
cnMaestro setup for CBRS for a new workstation.
2. More reasonable software maintenance options
3. Simple network design. 180 degree Access Points, self
contained, no EPC or other controllers, very simple. Just run
power and fiber to each Access Point, just like any other
Cambium access point.
4. Reasonably priced. The Access Points are about the same as PMP
450m, but cover 180 degrees.
2. Our problem was not capacity or throughput, it was coverage with
lots of trees. Therefore, a solution that had less overall
capacity, but better coverage was a better fit for us. After
talking with other WISPs that had run both 450m and Blinq, we think
this fits that requirement.
3. We have a number of 450i access points in place. We understand
that 450i and 450 are not the same due to a few factors, not the
least of which is max EIRP, however, we can run max EIRP on the
Blinqs and we were getting non-LOS coverage in our tests we wouldn’t
even attempt with the 450i’s. I know that folks will say that 450m
will do lots better than 450i, but from talking to folks who have
run both 450m and Blinq, the LTE technology handles trees better
than 450m at the same EIRP. I am not trying to start a war on this
topic, but that is what we learned.
For folks who need lots of capacity on each tower, the solution we went
with may not be the right path, and the 450m might be a far better
choice. However, we have a pretty significant tree problem and felt we
had to do everything we could to get the best non-LOS we could.
A couple of other notes. As others have said, cnHeat is awesome. We
modeled our towers using their non-LOS settings and tested out the Blinq
radios in partial LOS and complete non-LOS and compared against the
results cnHeat said we should get. It is very accurate.
As others have said the PMP 450m equipment is pretty hard to get, and we
had to know we could get the equipment for all towers by the middle of
Nov. We wouldn’t have been able to do that with 450m and wouldn’t have
been able to do this project.
I would love to see the Cambium CBRS LTE solution, but we just couldn’t
wait for it. This project has to be done by the end of the year.
We’ll know a heck of a lot more in two months when we get several
customers on each tower. Right now it is a lot of test results, but
not enough real world. We went through this process pretty fast, so
take our decisions with a grain of salt… 😊
Regards,
David Coudron
*From:* AF <af-boun...@af.afmug.com> *On Behalf Of * David Coudron
*Sent:* Sunday, November 8, 2020 12:50 PM
*To:* AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group <af@af.afmug.com>
*Subject:* Re: [AFMUG] LTE vendors
I will provide more detail when back in front of a computer but we
tested a few different things. We ended up doing Blinq Networks for a
few reasons. The nonLOS was pretty impressive. More to come....
Get Outlook for iOS <https://aka.ms/o0ukef>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*From:*AF <af-boun...@af.afmug.com <mailto:af-boun...@af.afmug.com>> on
behalf of Jeremy Grip <g...@nbnworks.net <mailto:g...@nbnworks.net>>
*Sent:* Sunday, November 8, 2020 11:37:30 AM
*To:* 'AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group' <af@af.afmug.com
<mailto:af@af.afmug.com>>
*Subject:* Re: [AFMUG] LTE vendors
Thought I’d pick up this thread again because I’m looking hard at CBRS
LTE for my densely forested town, largely because of its alleged foliage
penetration.
What’s anybody understand the EIRP limit for a 20Mhz channel to be now
in CBRS 3.65? Can I assume that modeling RSSI in a tool like RMD can
serve as a rough equivalent of RSRP? Vendor is telling me that where he
heatmaps a -100dBm signal represents full modulation—does that make any
sense? Maybe he’s being a little slimy and referring to uplink
modulation on a 1T4R UE?
And David—you started this thread and said you were trialling those
various platforms—anything to report? Did you get your hands on the
Baicells and/or Airspan stuff?
*From:* AF <af-boun...@af.afmug.com <mailto:af-boun...@af.afmug.com>>
*On Behalf Of *Adam Moffett
*Sent:* Monday, September 14, 2020 8:50 AM
*To:* af@af.afmug.com <mailto:af@af.afmug.com>
*Subject:* Re: [AFMUG] LTE vendors
For CBRS, depending on antenna and channel size, yes it's probably
legal. When I went to that Telrad training session a few years ago,
CBRS was still a hypothetical thing and everyone there was operating
under an NN license with the 1W/Mhz EIRP limit.
And yeah that's how ALL wireless works. At the moment in time when the
AP is talking to a station at 1Mbps, the capacity of the channel is
1Mbps. At the moment in time when the AP is talking to a station at
300Mbps, the capacity is 300Mbps. The average capacity over time is
going to be a function of how much time is spent talking to each station
at each rate. If you literally had one at 1Mbps and one at 300Mbps and
both were allocated equal airtime then your capacity would be 150.5Mbps.
It's true that a 5Mbps UE won't make the capacity of the eNB 5Mbps, but
it is true that while the channel is being used to talk to that UE, the
channel is only running at 5Mbps. My point was, if someone is testing
with a single UE and happy that they're getting 5Mbps, then they're
forgetting that they won't actually get 5Mbps when there are other UE
operating at the same time, and that the weak connections they install
are weakening efficiency of the whole sector. I know you know this, I
think you're just misinterpreting what I said.
On 9/14/2020 8:39 AM, Matt Hoppes wrote:
Hold on. 30dBm is well within legal power for CBRS.
Also a station connected getting 5 megabits is not dragging the
entire sector down to 5 megabits. That’s not how LTE works.
On Sep 14, 2020, at 8:34 AM, Adam Moffett <dmmoff...@gmail.com>
<mailto:dmmoff...@gmail.com> wrote:
Attenuation in 3.5ghz is on average 15db per 100meters of
foliage. I got that number from a Telrad engineer, and it
seemed to hold up experimentally. Whether it's Wimax, LTE, etc,
there's no reason that would be different.
LTE can connect with almost nothing for a signal. So a person
testing with a single base station and a single UE might run
around and say "wow I've got 5 megs here and No LOS!", but I
think they forget that the entire base station's capacity is
5meg when it's talking to that single UE at 5mbps. It's
impressive that it worked, but is that actually useful as a
fixed ISP?
Another thing I noticed is that Telrad could turn the Tx Power
all the way to +30dbm, and people were actually doing it, and
Telrad support seemed to be encouraging them to do it. At a
training session someone in Telrad support told me, "Adam, if
you're worried about the legal EIRP limit then you're the only
one worried about it." So if you're 8-10db stronger than the
legally operating product, and you can technically connect with
a signal too weak for the other product, that certainly makes
people feel like there's better penetration.
There may also be some "magic" in how LTE allocates resource
blocks and gets feedback from the UE's (CQI) on which resource
blocks are working best for each unit, but I think that's a
matter of getting the most value possible out of a trashy
signal. If you're a fixed operator building for capacity and
performance then you hopefully won't be installing with a trashy
signal anyway.
My biggest issue of all is that all of the WISP priced LTE stuff
is clunky and buggy. Frankly, that was true of WiMax too. It
seemed like Telrad's bridging modes never quite worked right for
example. You were better off building an L2 tunnel on your own
box behind the UE.
-Adam
On 9/14/2020 12:19 AM, Ken Hohhof wrote:
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>
<mailto:af-boun...@af.afmug.com> *On Behalf Of *Trey Scarborough
*Sent:* Sunday, September 13, 2020 4:43 PM
*To:* af@af.afmug.com <mailto: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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Troy, OH 45373
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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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