Is the CubeSA 60Pro ac a real, shipping, thing yet?
I have a farm that has some old 5Ghz PtP links. The problem is they are not playing to well with my WAPS. And the throughput is pretty low.
Most of the shots are clear line of sight.
was thinking maybe 60Ghz sector antennas???
Anyone tried one yet?
I have a bunch of the wireless wire cube out there and they have been solid. But since there are several location in the same general direction… it would be more suited for sector rather than PtP each building.
We’ve been using them for a while now and gradually expanding the network. We were delighted with them initially but have found that if we have more than three stations on a AP the throughput drops by quite a lot. We thought that if, say, three out of four were idle the fourth would get almost the full capacity. This doesn’t seem to happen. To be fair, we haven’t researched this completely and it could be caused by something we haven’t yet considered.
The APs have a hard maximum of six stations, while other suppliers have fifteen on their 60 GHz products.I do not know why that is; perhaps it is related to throughput considerations?
On the plus side, they are very easy to install; the beam forming seems to sort out any small alignment errors. Also the pricing is very good and they are quite small in comparison to others.
I have often wondered why the stations are larger than the APs; I would have thought that the AP would have a larger, more complicated antenna system. Does anyone know?
I hope this helps a bit and might stimulate some discussion.
@gotsprings I haven’t used the SA’s at this point. I’m using wAP60’s and Cube60’s as AP’s with up to 8 CPE at a time and have over 100 customers deployed on them. Cube 60 Pro’s as CPE work very well, along with the older Cubes and LHG’s. I use Cubes up to about 500m and LHG60 up to 750m. For redundancy, the Cubes’ WiFi radio can connect to an OmniTik, which can also power the 60GHz APs.
For higher density deployments I’m using Tachyon Networks (32 in 120 degrees) and for distance Ubiquiti’s Wave (24 subs in 30 or 90 degrees up to 8km/5mi).
The price difference between the MikroTik and UBNT stuff is pretty small. Made me question if I should even bother with MikroTik 60Ghz. Just use the UBNT gear which would tie in UNMS.
Doesn’t cost that much more.
Can handle greater distances.
Can handle more clients per radio.
It’s almost a year now and we have more experience with the Ubiquiti kit. We’ve used the Wave AP Micro, the Wave Nano and the Wave Pico. We continue to use the Mikrotik cubes. Here’s my view of the comparison:
Ubiquiti has the ability to connect 31 client radios (we haven’t gone that far yet), We found that connecting more than four Mikrotiks reduced the throughput for each user. I think this could be solved with a better polling scheme.
The Ubiquiti clients do not have much in the way of beam forming - they are very difficult to align. You just point the Mikrotik radios in the general direction and they connect fine.
Ubiquiti kit has longer range - it’s hard to quantify this except to say that the numbers produced by Ubiquiti seem to be pretty accurate.
Ubiquiti has more channels available in a wider band (UK models anyway). It is easy to get away from the bad attenuation region at about 59 GHz.
Ubiquiti AP has a 2.5 Gbit/s ethernet port. We haven’t needed to use that yet but will do in the future. The clients have a 1 Gbit/s port. Mikrotik is all 1 Gbit/s even though they often report that the radio connection is at 2.3 Gbit/s, so that capacity can’t be used.
The Ubiquiti radios are quite heavy and need a very solid mounting; Mikrotik ones are much more forgiving.
The Ubiquit radios have higher transmit power levels. In the UK, this means that you have to have a licence (£75 for five years). Mikrotik cubes are licence-exempt.
Both types have better tolerance of heavy rain than we feared.
The latest Ubiquiti firmware allows the backup radio to be turned off (clients only). This can help with interference. Mikrotik radios have always had this feature.
Ubiquiti radios have better measurement of signal quality via SNMP.
The Ubiquiti kit is more expensive but there is a trend downwards.
I have some trouble with CubeSA Pro (just the AP, not the Cube Pro stations) in a PtMP setup. It seems to introduce a lot of latency and jitter, even at low traffic, and I have reproduced it in a lab setup with the second CubeSA Pro as well, so it’s not distance or interference (or single bad hardware - though it could be a bad whole batch of the hardware as both were from the same shipment, one of the first ones when introduced, devices were not yet available in PL so I ordered them from CZ to be the first one to test them). It’s just that the good old wAP60G-AP (the one with license level 4, be careful when buying as there are also level 3 station-only devices without the “-A” in product code) work better as long as there is more than one stations connected, latency is lower and more consistent.
That’s a pity, as my main reason why I was waiting for the new “ay” devices (other than >8 stations and Terragraph, also never happened) was channel 5 support for longer range - the old APs only support channels 1-4. On the positive side - only the new AP is broken, the new CubePro stations seem to work well connected to the old wAP60G-AP, so they are good replacements for the discontinued Cube-60ad.
The jitter and latency issue with the CubeSA Pro is the same with both RouterOS 6.49.3 (in the lab, version the device had from the factory) and 7.15.3 (in the field, upgraded in the hope the issue would be fixed but it is still not). All it takes to reproduce is connect 2 stations to the AP, even with no real traffic the jitter becomes a few more milliseconds on the new CubeSA Pro compared to the same test done with the old wAP60G-AP where latency increases significanly only under heavy traffic.
EDIT: added SmokePing graph, in the middle (Sep 2024) was the point when the old wAP60G-AP was replaced with the new CubeSA Pro, as the AP for 5 stations (earlier replaced one-by-one from the older Cube60 or LHG60).
I will say this: I have hundreds of Ubiquiti Wave units deployed. Where possible, I’m replacing my 5GHz UI gear (LTU & AirMax) with Wave.
I had quite a bit of MikroTik 60GHz also deployed, but I’m overbuilding and replacing it all (slowly) with Tachyon 30X radios. They use the same Peraso chips as Wave, have 2.5Gbps ports (and a 1Gbps POE out port), and are rock solid.
The Qualcomm chip pales in comparison to the Peraso chipset: 8 clients vs. 32, short range vs. long range, 4 channels of 2160MHz vs 5 channels of 2160 or 10 channels of 1080MHz, etc. And the Peraso radios stay connected much better.
I would love to see a MikroTik/RouterOS implementation using Peraso radios. Imagine an AP running 1, 2, or 3 radio modules (for 120°, 240°, or 360° coverage) and different CPE options for 1- and 2.5Gbps connectivity… One can dream.
I haven’t personally used the CubeSA 60Pro ac, but I’ve had good experiences with MikroTik gear in the past. Before you commit to a full deployment, I’d suggest grabbing one and testing it out in a real-world scenario on your farm. See how it handles the distance and any potential interference. That’ll give you a better idea if it’s the right solution for you.
