Title: Message
Total Agreement from me!!!  I was thinking of putting their access points into use, but will keep looking.  Manufacturer of the year!?!?!?!?  Part 15 needs to look else where for that award!!!!
 
Scott
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Bobby Bounds
Sent: Friday, June 13, 2003 5:53 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [smartBridges] We've just about had it

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]

 

 

 

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