B5/B5c, who has 'em? product+company reviews wanted

[rebelwireless]

I know one person with a couple and he is really liking them.....but maybe I think he's easily impressed haha. Looking for some real-world reviews by 'realists'.

I'm so fed up with ubiquiti that I've even lost excitement about the AF5x :( Last week, lost a unifi-ac, a toughswitch, and my airCRM beta site had 2 CPE brick during the beta3 firmware update. All devices were just barely out of warranty. I really want to see how a) performance actually stacks up for the b5*, b) how the firmware is, any 'beta like' issues like we see with every ubnt firmware, and c) the less tangible 'what kind of vendor will mimosa be'.

not to rant too much, but I'm well into 2 greenfield AC gear deployments and though they are performing nicely when things are right, they need quite a bit more signal for things to be right. a -70 M AP+Client will perform better than a -70 AC AP+Client for instance. I'm really interested in Mimosa's PtMP *but* I don't want to jump ship if the products *&* company aren't better or more in tune with a wISPs needs.

[iellison]

We've tested the B5 and B5c's, and so far I am very impressed. I'm not a big fan of the registration process, but I also understand why they are doing it in the bigger scheme of their software model. They seem to be all about the cloud, with some interesting future tools for support and even for the WISP's to use to manage their gear. The way they handle DFS with the second radio, and being able to run spectrum analysis without taking down the link, is huge.

As a company, I am again very impressed. They spent a lot of time up front getting feedback from industry leaders before rolling out product. There have been a few bugs that were fixed through firmware updates, but nothing earth shattering. The biggest thing I have to get over is knowing that Jamie was the man behind all those damned 2WIRE home routers that were destroying spectrum on DSL installs :)

Right now they seem mostly focused on urban WiFi as far as PTMP goes. Probably gunning for UBNT's UniFi product. The specs we've seen so far on how they plan to do their more WISP centric products though... very impressive. If they even pull off half of what they say they can, our spectral efficiency will be greatly improved. They're hot and heavy on the beam forming.

[rebelwireless]

beamforming is super obvious to me. ubnt is NOT capable of this with their current gear, they are 2 channel only (2 pigtails!) on their APs, so no firmware update etc is going to do it. It's new radios, and new sectors, and with a handful of pigtails to get 4 or 8 elements instead of 2, this screams custom cable or integrated radio. They haven't hinted at this in any way.

Mimosa is going with integrated radio, MU-MIMO based beamforming, and are in the sack with the chip vendor to make it all happen. really exciting!

[wtm]

Well,
Last night we installed our first Mimosa B5c link!

We finally had enough from all the promises by UBNT to get the AF5x's out, and with customers screaming, we bit the bullet and ordered them in.

This is to replace one of a 2 link backhaul, coming out of an urban city to a rural area, so we can serve our rural customers there. It (currently is) WAS using Rockets on Rocket Dishes. We were lucky to get @ 60 Mbps on Download with it, and it would drop 10 Db signal at night, and the TX/RX rates would fluctuate all over the place.

We have a 1 gig fiber drop for the circuit, and that immediately setup the dreaded 1 gig to 100 Mbps network mismatch headache! The main router is a UBNT ERL3, and the first order of business was to replace the Tough switch there with a "Dumb" Netgear switch, convert the ERL3 to provide 100 Mbps "Half Duplex" to interface with the Rockets. Now we have a new Netonix's 8 port switch in there, and the ERL3 is set back to 1 Gig port.

Some things you have to be aware of when converting from a UBNT Rocket to the Mimosa B5c unit. One is the voltage, the B5c is a 48 volt unit, Rocket is 24 volts. In some cases, that means to re-do the entire power supply in the cabinet to provide for the higher voltage. We had to gut one cabinet, pull the DLI POE24 unit, and the backup batteries, and replace it with 12 volt batteries, a charge, and several "Up-Converter" power supply units. (Available on EBAY for @ $4-8 each). We can then supply 12, 24, and 48 volts within the cabinet to various devices.

The second thing, is that the B5c will not fit in the back of the rocket dish. It is mounted on the support pole for the Rocket dish with pipe straps. SO you have to purchase 2 rf "Jumper" cables @ 2-3 feet long to connect it to the dish.

The B5c GUI layout is a bit different to use, but it is straight forward, and works well. Once connected as a link, the AP controls everything on the STN unit (TX Power, Frequency, Bandwidth,etc)

The capability to also select the percentage of what you want for Download versus Upload throughput on the link is really impressive! We are using 75 Down/ 25 Up.
This link shows that it will now provide up to 180 Mbps Download for us(40 Mhz bandwidth)! We will see how it runs during the Netflix demands, and if it fluctuates as much as the Rocket did. So far we had very minimum drop in signal last night during installation.

And the Netonix switch is doing the POE for it at the remote end, and working well! (Note: we had to convert the switch from AC to DC supply for that site)

One NOTE, that needs to be made, is that the band 5600-5650 needs to be setup as an "exclusion", as it does not list TDWR sites, and will recommend you to use those frequencies if you are not careful !

But I give the unit Was worth the cost !

(just need to get Mimosa to give us a Stand Alone server version of the monitoring product-SORRY, can't/won't use the "CLOUD")

[wtm]

Is anyone doing any "beta" firmware testing on these units? Wondered how the next firmware version is going to work, and what changes we might expect ?