ESSENTIAL HABITECH

Cambium is a true end-to-end wireless solution with an unbeatable value proposition

BUILDING BETTER NETWORKS WITH CAMBIUM

When the cost of networking products is up and supply is down, Habitech has the answer with the class-leading affordability and performance of our new Cambium Networks brand, says Technical Manager Justin Martin-Lawrence.

Today, rapid Internet access and Wi-Fi coverage are viewed by homes and businesses as the fourth utility. It’s impossible to imagine a successful CI job without them, especially now that home working has made network access for leisure and work a critical lifestyle ingredient. Your customers are demanding no-fail control over ever faster service delivery, which is why our ProNET platform of CI-centric networking product lines and training is more relevant to your business than ever.

BEATING THE SQUEEZE

Believe me, we’re feeling the love for ProNET - it now accounts for 25% of our business - but were also sharing the pressure as chip availability dries up post Covid. Prices from leading manufacturers are sky high as they try to absorb component price increases, while supply is faltering. Facing spiralling costs and driven by unrealistic expectations from social media, your customers are looking online for answers, with no guarantee that the cheaper PoE switch, or AP they just bought will meet all of its promises: it may even be a dud. So how should our industry, practiced as it is in problem solving and believing in quality and high performance, respond to all this uncertainty?

Habitech’s answer is to get better at the things we’re already doing well. For over a year we’ve been working on a new ProNET range, backed by the industry’s best training and supported by fast order fulfilment from new supplier relationships with Rivi, Netgear and Cambium Networks.

CAMBIUM TO THE RESCUE

We’re particularly ‘wired’ about Cambium because it meets demand in the mid-market where cost pressures are most acute. It’s the remedy that satisfies all those looking outside the industry for that elusive blend of capability and lower cost. Cambium is a true end-to-end wireless solution with an unbeatable value proposition in which free-of-charge licensing and software maintenance - as well as limited lifetime warranties - dramatically lower the total cost of ownership. Best of all it keeps all the power and control over durable high quality network design in your hands.

Spun out of Motorola in 2011, Cambium is a specialist manufacturer of enterprise Wi-Fi and network switch products whose ‘Wireless Fabric’ infrastructure, unified by the cnMaestro™ cloud management system, has been proven by countless real-world deployments across the US and globally for over a decade. Promising affordable, dependable Wi-Fi and

switching solutions that ‘simply just work’ our new Cambium range for low to high density environments offers you no fewer than five Enterprise ‘X’ Series Wi-Fi 6 indoor/outdoor Access Points and two cnPilot™ ‘E’ Series 802.11ac Wave 2 indoor/outdoor Access Points, complemented by three cnMatrix™ gigabit switches: 16/24/48 port, L2/L3 with SFP and 240W/400W PoE+ capabilities.

FREE-FOR-LIFE

And the jewel in the Cambium proposition is the simplest configuration through its free-forlife cnMaestro cloud management. Maestro is HTML5 based and so, like Ruckus SmartZone, is completely portable across all platforms. What’s more, it offers limitless customer accounts and within each account as many as 2000 sites. In practical terms its capacity is boundless. You’ll get a ‘single pane of glass’ for device configuration, diagnostics, throughput, even an RF spectrum analyser for complete system management, and unlike many cloudbased products, cnMaestro doesn’t need to be running for Wi-Fi operation. Register and preconfigure your devices by simply scanning a barcode or entering a serial number at the office prior to installation on site. Easy. Even easier is Cambium’s companion ‘Swift’ app, which runs on cnMaestro for one-touch, out-of-the-box deployments, making it ideal as a means to get the system up and running as quickly as possible for the customer.

ACCESS POWERFUL DESIGN FLEXIBILITY

We’ve curated our Cambium offering to deliver unbreakable Wi-Fi performance in almost any residential and small office design scenario. We kick off with the ‘E’ Series E410 indoor and E510 outdoor (IP67) 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac dual band APs, which offer seamless roaming and classleading coverage and capacity for low, medium and high density applications. Meanwhile the ‘X’ Series APs give you the power to fully exploit the data capacity of Wi-Fi 6: the XV2-2 is a dual radio design with RF optimisation, and unusually for APs in this category, a 2.5Gbps port. Stepping up the range, the versatile XV3-8 8x8 AP features a total of five radios to deliver a next-generation network with edge services for high capacity and high density. Three of its data radios can be configured as two 5 GHz 4x4 plus one 2.4 GHz 4x4, or the two 5 GHz radios can be combined into a single 5 GHz 8x8 radio to reach maximum power and performance within the 802.11ax standard. Alongside is the XE3-4, a tri radio Wi-Fi 6/6E 4×4/2×2 AP, which extends the capacity of Wi-Fi into the 6 GHz band, more than tripling the wireless spectrum available, while the five radio XE5-8 Wi-Fi 6/6E 8×8/4×4 design delivers arguably the highest density Wi-Fi 6 solution in the industry. Then there’s the XV2-2T0 outdoor AP, which couples Wi-Fi 6 technology with high efficiency antennas to send higher throughput as far as 1km, saving costs on equipment, cabling, installation and maintenance for the largest outdoor Wi-Fi deployments.

Cambium offers you as many as five Enterprise ‘X’ Series Wi-Fi 6 indoor/outdoor APs and two E’ Series 802.11ac Wave 2 indoor/outdoor APs

ZERO-TOUCH SWITCH CONFIGURATION

Sealing the deal are three fully compatible and managed multigigabit cnMatrix switches, designed to work seamlessly and simply with the Cambium APs in a unified wired-to-wireless access environment, each delivering full Layer 2 and Layer 3 capabilities with enhanced access security. The new line-up includes the 16 port (8x1G, 6x2.5G, 2xSFP+) EX2016M-P with 240W POE++, the 24 port (24x1G, 4xSFP+) EX2028-P with 400W POE, and the 48 port (48x1G, 4xSFP+) EX2052-P with 400W POE+. In addition to all this design versatility, the switches will save you hours of coding on site through Cambium’s uniquely powerful Policy Based Automation (PBA). Rather than having to laboriously hardcode every port on the switch in the traditional way, PBA allows you to develop and apply ‘rule of thumb’ policies for device types off-site and in minutes. When adding, say, multiple surveillance cameras to the switch, the policy handles device profiling and segmentation automatically: no manual configuration is necessary. Plug the device into any port and the switch knows what to do, and when you remove the device, the applicable coding disappears from the network, boosting security. PBA’s auto device configuration means that all of your design changes are accomplished through a zero-touch experience, avoiding input errors, saving costly network configuration and downtime while optimising performance. Simple and so cost effective!

APPLIED PRONET

Cambium’s class-leading capabilities and time saving economies make the challenges of designing feature-rich, high quality, unified wired or wireless enterprise grade networks easier and more affordable. I’ve thrown everything at Cambium and I’m happy to report that you can believe the marketing: it just works! We’re confident that Cambium’s powerful versatility won’t let you down, because for the past seven months, Habitech’s office Wi-Fi has relied on it! Best of all you’ll benefit from secure supply and a peerless synergy of product and support from a single source. With Cambium Networks, we’re keeping our ProNET promise to your business more effectively than ever.

To discover all that Cambium Networks has to offer, please contact the Habitech team on 01256 638500; sales@habitech.co.uk.

Habitech Habitech.co.uk

Cambium APs are complemented by three cnMatrix™ gigabit switches: 16/24/48 port, L2/L3 with SFP and 240W/400W PoE+