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:
* 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.
* More reasonable software maintenance options
* 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.
* 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 <[email protected]> On Behalf Of David Coudron
Sent: Sunday, November 8, 2020 12:50 PM
To: AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group <[email protected]>
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 <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> on behalf of
Jeremy Grip <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>
Sent: Sunday, November 8, 2020 11:37:30 AM
To: 'AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group' <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>
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 <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> On Behalf Of
Adam Moffett
Sent: Monday, September 14, 2020 8:50 AM
To: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>
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
<[email protected]><mailto:[email protected]> 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 <[email protected]><mailto:[email protected]> On Behalf Of
Trey Scarborough
Sent: Sunday, September 13, 2020 4:43 PM
To: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>
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
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> 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
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> 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
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> 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
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On Fri, Sep 11, 2020 at 5:54 PM Adam Moffett
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> 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
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>
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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3DS Communications LLC
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