Well, today was another day in
SmartBridges hell. For the last four weeks we’ve had a rash of equipment
failure and early DOA on replacement equipment that exceeds all
reasonableness. Roughly 50% of all new equipment we have been getting from
SmartBridges is either early DOA or faulty in some way. We’ve had approx. 10
units that have failed and are worthless to us. The APPO’s and ABO’s just
don’t seem to be designed properly (the indoor units are fairly reliable).
Today, I set up a new A/P in
Repeater mode about 1 mile from the parent unit. This caused all associated
customers to loose their connection to the parent A/P. I wrongly assumed the
parent unit had failed. I tried replacing it with a new unit. The new unit did
not function. I finally decided to disconnect the repeater unit. The parent
unit started working correctly at that point. What happened here? Did I set
something up wrong?
Today was just one day in many
during the last month where we had big problems just keeping the
infrastructure running. We’ve had the “ethernet port dying” problem in a great
big way. Two brand new replacement ABO’s worked about two hours then failed.
We installed a new AP Pro Indoor that we discovered turned out to be shorting
out against it’s case. It is difficult to remotely monitor and reset this
equipment. This causes expensive truck rolls. The worst part is that it makes
you look really stupid in front of the customer when you have to show up every
week and/or ask them to cycle power on their equipment many times per month.
Maybe if there was phone support we could have avoided mistakes on our part.
Don’t see how SB could afford that considering the low price point of their
products. The issue for us is the reliability of our infrastructure. I just
don’t see SmartBridges equipment being reliable enough for a WISP
infrastructure.
The “Total” product line has been
a disappointment for us. The antennas are rated at 13db I believe but we are
getting poor antenna performance on these units. The mounting bracket metal is
so thin the units shake in the wind. A grounding solution should be built into
all units.
The new version of Simple
Monitor no longer has the ‘link test’ and ‘ping test’ and ‘refresh’ features
on the ‘Client Info’ tab. And no IP addresses. Why is that? Perhaps we’re just
not educated or trained enough on this equipment. SmartBridges should have an
http interface to all it’s units and instead of these buggy 32 bit clients.
Also, they should simplify their product line and make one type of radio that
can be either an A/P or a Bridge. If SmartBridges is targeting WISP’s their
units should be designed to be totally modular so they can be removed and
replaced with quick connectors and more thought should be put into the
mounting systems.
I’m afraid the WISP industry is
going to get a real bad rap if WISP operators cannot maintain at least as high
a QOS and network up-time as cable and DSL and satellite operators. >From our
vantage point it looks to us like the Outdoor line is not a mature product
line and was released before adequate field testing was done. In all fairness
we have only been in business one year and I’m sure we are making our share of
mistakes in installing and configuring this equipment. I have no idea if other
manufacturers’ have higher quality equipment but at this point it looks like
in order to stay in business we have to switch to equipment that is more
reliable even if the cost is two or three times higher. The low price-point of
the SmartBridges line is what attracted us to it. As in so many things in
life, you can pay now or you can pay later. So, in our case we bought cheap
but we are paying dearly right now.
Bobby Bounds
Airwave Internet,
LLC
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
