Solutions and Markets

Be the Broadband Service Provider of Choice

Utilize Cambium Network’s Quality of Experience (QoE) solution to reduce churn and improve customer satisfaction while saving money with fewer support calls. Offer customers a range of price points and service levels and optimize the usage of network resources.

Cambium QoE solution is completely hardware agnostic. Enjoy the numerous advanced features on any equipment that you use to offer broadband services. From fiber to licensed and unlicensed wireless, Cambium Network’s QoE solution.

QoE Bandwidth Shaping and Rate Limiting Improve end customer experience

With granular application shaping, dynamic queue-based rate limiting, congestion management and application insights, broadband service providers have immediate access to the information and controls to optimize end user experiences and be the service provider of choice.

Video: Zirkel Wireless Reduces Residential Trouble Calls with QoE

Eric Nowland, President & CEO of Wyoming.com shares how he delivers exceptional end user experiences while maximizing return on investment with QoE.

Learn how one broadband service provider reducing buffering and improved customer satisfaction with QoE.

50% off 1 year subscription or a customized trial
just for your needs

Experience the QoE difference for yourself in a 21 day no obligation trial.

For a limited time, you can see for yourself by trying the Cambium Networks QoE Starter Kit with special first time user pricing or a Custom Trial.

  • Improve throughput and all your application performance for end users with TCP optimization;
  • Reduce customer support calls and achieve greater customer satisfaction;
  • Gain insight into your network with application visibility and shape traffic based on applications to further enhance QoE and save on bandwidth; and
  • Use insightful statistics to root cause customer issues and see subscriber health.

Hear how network operators are optimizing their networks, maximizing ROI and delivering exceptional broadband experiences with Quality of Experience

View a live demo by Eric Nowland, President & CEO of Wyoming.com

Feature Overview

TCP Optimization

TCP is the most widely used protocol on the Internet, but, like other transport protocols, when networks are not perfect, it tends to transmit at a lower speed than what the network allows. Cambium QoE TCP Optimization functionality, makes sure that TCP traffic flowing through it reaches optimal speeds, resulting in faster downloads and uploads.

Cambium QoE platform will act as a transparent proxy for every TCP connection in the network, which will increase their speed in two ways. First, because as a proxy, contents will affectively appear closer to clients, and closer always means faster in Internet. Second, because our enhanced TCP will still send at the optimal speed in non-perfect networks.

Cambium QoE TCP stack detects congestion based on the measured delivery rate, as described in our patent portfolio. Our improved congestion detection algorithm allows our TCP to be more aggressive when there is no congestion and to back off in real congestion, being able to carry out this discrimination in challenging environments: with shallow buffers, wireless links, packet losses or large network delays.

Key Benefits:

  • Faster downloads and uploads
  • TCP proxy makes contents closer to the clients
  • Optimal speed in non-perfect networks
  • Patented and improved congestion detection algorithm
  • Average page loading time reduced by 30% among popular web services 

View an in-depth report comparing our TCP stack with Cubic, BBR and BBR2 TCP here.

Rate limiting with multi-queue approach

Cambium QoE platform allows you to enforce bandwidth limitations in a flexible and economical way, with the most advanced queueing technology in the market, which will deliver the best possible Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE).

When speed is limited, network packets must wait in queues to be delivered, which increases network latency and can create packet losses. As a result, the network Quality of Experience may be severely degraded, especially for interactive applications, like on-line games and teleconferences, which are very sensitive to latency and losses.

Our unique multi-queue technology guarantees an independent queue for each connection, without any sharing (unlike competing solutions). Multiple independent queues ensure that interactive data do not have to wait in queues with heavy traffic, like video streaming. Moreover, interactive queues are prioritized. In this way, interactive applications will not notice the rate limitation, even in congestion situations.

Key Benefits:

  • Reduced application latency
  • Prioritize interactive or real time applications

Automatic congestion management

We have used the most advanced machine-learning algorithms to allow congestion management with no configuration or integration effort. Our Automatic Congestion Management (ACM), when enabled, will continuously monitor all network users, their speed, latency, and packet losses, and detect if they are reaching a congestion. When congestion is detected, it will just limit the speed marginally, which will reduce latency and losses, and avoid the congestion, providing a much better Quality-of-Experience.

Key Benefits:

  • Reduce latency and eliminates packet drops during peak traffic time
  • Boost on-line game, teleconference experience during traffic congestion

Network visibility

To deliver the best quality to your network users, it is obviously necessary to be able to measure and monitor it. Cambium QoE provides you the key metrics to monitor the quality you are delivering to your users and the quality you are getting from those connecting you to the Internet.

Our advanced DPI (Deep Packet Inspection) technology can see what services are being used in your network. In this way, you can plan your Internet peering, predict the traffic behavior, and diagnose service-specific problems. It also shows the latencies from your network to the different services, and how those latencies vary over time, which can help you measure the quality of the services delivered by different providers.

Key Benefits:

  • Discover the services running in your network
  • Displays hourly/total volume per service up to 3 days
  • Displays % consumption of subscriber IPs for a service
  • Displays average internet latency per service
  • Helps service providers to diagnose excessive internet service latency

Statistics

To be in control and to extract the highest quality out of your network, you need metrics for your subscribers’ quality of experience (QoE). The Cambium QoE measures the latency and the packet losses/retransmissions experienced by each subscriber in real time and keeps those metrics for three months. It also keeps graphs for 3 months of actual usage and maximum speed attained, together with the active and created connections. In this way, it is also possible to diagnose the complex networking problems.

Key Benefits:

  • Helps service providers to know the RF health of their subscribers and optimize the network
  • Service providers know their top bandwidth consumers and helps to upsell internet packages

Application shaping

Cambium QoE limits the speed of all the subscriber flows based on traffic type or matching an application definition. Streaming and software updates are example of biggest bandwidth consumers on Internet. This can affect quality-of-experience of other interactive applications like Zoom, Teams, Google meet or a VoIP call. Cambium QoE’s DPI based traffic shaping rules allow users to limit the streaming bandwidth as per streaming providers bit rate recommendations.

Shaping streaming services to smaller bandwidth will NOT impact performance. Streaming services often work to maximize the speed offered to pre-load their buffers which can take up a lot of bandwidth. By shaping, you are still allowing the necessary bandwidth but not consuming unnecessary bandwidth. Cambium QoE offers traffic shaping based on total traffic for an end user IP or flow-based for an application.

Key Benefits:

  • Service providers can ensure quality-of-experience to VoIP service
  • Enforce priority to SPEEDTEST applications
  • Enforce priority to teleconferencing applications
  • Enforce time-based traffic shaping
  • Manage network congestion during peak hours by shaping streaming services
  • Restrict software updates, game downloads only during off peak hours  
  • Block or limit speed of Torrent traffic

Denial of service

The QoE platform can detect Denial-of-Service attacks, both starting from your subscribers, or targeted at them. It can inform you about the likely source or target of those attacks on the Internet, so that you can take appropriate measures.

Hardware Requirements

Tower Model Appliance

1 Gbps temperature hardened appliance. Ideal for tower deployment where temperature controlled environment may not be available.

Appliance Capacity: 1 Gbps

  • Hardware Model: Cambium QoE
  • CPU: Intel® Atom® C3558 4C
  • RAM: 8 GB
  • Hard Disk: 32GB
  • Data Interface: Intel® SoC MAC with 1 x Marvell 88E1543 PHY, 2 x Intel i211
  • Management Interface: One RJ45 port of data interface
  • Operating Temperature: -20 ~ 70 °C (-4 ~ 158 °F)

NOC Model Appliance

NOC model supporting capacity from 5Gbps to 100Gbps. Applicable to any type of network.

Generic hardware requirements

Specification1 Gbps5 Gbps10 Gbps20 Gbps40 Gbps100 Gbps
CPU ManufacturerIntel/AMDIntel/AMDIntel/AMDIntel/AMDIntel/AMDIntel/AMD
Cores4810163264
Minimum Threads48162464128
Minimum RAM8 GB2 x 16GB2 x 16GB4 x 16GB8 x 16GB16 x 16GB
Minimum Hard Disk
(SATA/SAS/NMVe)
60 GB2 x 120GB2 x 120GB2 x 240GB2 x 480GB2 x 960GB
Data InterfaceIntel I210/Intel I350Intel X520/X540/X550
/X710/XL710
Intel X520/X540/X550
/X710/XL710
Intel XL710/XXV710
/E810
Intel XL710/XXV710
/E810
Intel XXV710/E810
Management InterfaceOn-Board 1GbOn-Board 1GbOn-Board 1GbOn-Board 1GbOn-Board 1GbOn-Board 1Gb

Virtual Platforms

Cambium QoE Supports:

  • VMware
  • KVM (with Linux kernel of the host machine of 4.11 or later and QEMU of version 2.9 or later)

All resources will be fully dedicated (pinned) to the virtual machine (no oversubscription). As a general guideline, use the following resources. For advanced support, contact Cambium support.

Key Specifications

Appliance Capacity1Gbps10Gbps
Virtual CPU*214
RAM6 GB32 GB
Hard Disk60 GB120 GB
Data InterfaceIntel network cards with PCI passthroughIntel networks cards with PCI passthrough
* Each vCPU is equivalent to one core of an Intel XeonE5-2630 v4 @ 2.20GHz CPUs, with hyperthreading enabled

Networks Placement Guidance

There are several ways to introduce the QOE device into your network. Since the QOE box is an in-line device it allows for flexible installation into any Service Provider network.

We will outline seven of the most common scenarios in which the Cambium QOE can be deployed.  Each of these is dependent on your network architecture. 

Scenario-1

Deployment Model: Point-to-Point Bridge

Sustainable for point-to-point links. You can install this either on the Service Provider side or the customer side before their router

Scenario-2

Deployment Model: Basic PoP

This scenario is to mainly illustrate the placement of the QOE box into your wireless network.  Most customers will have more than one access point at each location. If you are NATing at the router the QOE box needs to go before the router.

Scenario-3

Deployment Model: Routed PoP

This method is highly dependent on the amount of LAN ports on the QOE. Otherwise, it is no different than scenario 2 In order to increase the number of ports we recommend adding a switch.  You access points can plug into the switch with a single uplink through the QOE.  You can divide the Access Points into VLANs if you like.  The QOE will understand the VLANs and pass them through to the router.

Scenario-4

Deployment Model: Advanced Routed PoP

This scenario is the best, in terms of technical implementation, of all the methods.  It allows for seamless failover at the POP level should the QOE box fail due to power or cable damage. If it fails, it just affects that POP. With the above OSPF bypass you can keep running.

This scenario does require two layer3 devices at each POP talking OSPF between them. The POP router in the diagram can be a layer3 switch to save on the physical footprint.

Scenario-5

Deployment Model: Single Headend

Placing the QOE box at the headend of your network makes the most sense for some operators. This combines the cost-effective nature of centralize shaping with less hardware to maintain. This scenario is easiest accomplished if you are running MPLS/VPLS on your network. This design allows for a variation of the POP scenario listed above using VPLS tunnels to route traffic around the QOE box in case of failure or maintenance. In this method you are moving all of the shaping functions to a central location. This adds an element of failure as your traffic is going through one central box.  However, like the above method you can mitigate this with a routed bypass.

Scenario-6

Deployment Model: Multiple Exit Point

As Service Providers grow their networks, they often run into having multiple exit points on their network.  Since the QOE box is transparent these can be positioned at each headend in the same scenario as in Scenario 5 above.  You would just have hardware at each exit point.

Scenario-7

Deployment Model: MSP or ISP Managed Router

This scenario is helpful if you do not control the Service Provider network but want to give customers a Quality of Experience.  Maybe you are an MSP supporting enterprise clients.  In this scenario you install the QOE box between the customer’s LAN network and the ISP router.

QoE Bypass Guidance

It is recommended that a bypass path is established between the neighboring nodes of the QoE Access and Internet Gateways. If there is a failure in the active link or the QoE, the traffic is automatically steered through the bypass path. Monitoring takes place through a USB connection between the QoE server and the bypass appliance.

Appliance Model 1: NIAGARA 3296

Key Specifications:

  • Up to 8 full bypass segments. Each bypass segments include two network ports and two appliance ports
  • Copper, fiber multimode Bidi and fiber single mode network interfaces
  • Supports SX, SR, SR4, LX, LR, LR4
  • Network links from 10Mb to 100Gb

Normal Inline Mode

Bypass Mode

In case an external heartbeat is not received for the appropriate segment, and the countdown timer for that segment expires, the affected segment will go into bypass mode.

Appliance Model 2: Silicom Ethernet Bypass Networking Server Adapters

The Silicom’s ethernet bypass networking server adapters are targeted to inline network system that maintains network connectivity when system fails. Silicom’s dual or quad port fiber 10 G ethernet bypass server adapter is a PCI-Express X8 network interface card that contains two or four 10 G ethernet ports on a PCI-E adapter. These adapters should plug in a host server machine as a NIC accessory.

Normal Mode

In normal mode, the ports are independent interfaces

Bypass Mode

In bypass mode, all packets received from one port are transmitted to the adjacent port

Key Specifications:

ModelPE310G2BPI71
NICDual Port Fiber 10 Gigabit Intel® XL710BM1 Based
Interface StandardPCI-Express Base Specification Revision 3.0 (8 GTs)
Board SizeStandard height short add-in card 167.64mm X 109.1 mm (6.6”X 4.296”)
PCI Express Card TypeX8 Lane
PCI Express Voltage+12V ± 8%
PCI ConnectorGold Finger: X8 Lane
HolderMetal Bracket
I/OLC located on internal bracket

Key Specifications:

ModelPE310G4BPI71
NICQuad Port Fiber 10 Gigabit Intel® XL710BM1 Based
Interface StandardPCI-Express Base Specification Revision 3.0 (8 GTs)
Board SizeStandard height short add-in card 167.64mm X 109.1 mm (6.6”X 4.296”)
PCI Express Card TypeX8 Lane
PCI Express Voltage+12V ± 8%
PCI ConnectorGold Finger: X8 Lane
HolderMetal Bracket
I/OLC located on internal bracket

Billing Support

Cambium QoE integrates with leading ISP billing platforms to retrieve subscriber data and implement rate limits. The integration is between a billing system that controls the plan definition and Cambium QoE, through its management interface.

Integration benefits:

  • Auto create rate control policies (the subscription plans).
  • Assign a plan to a subscriber.
  • Obtain subscriber metrics for up to 3 months: volume used, maximum speed, latency, retransmissions, and active/created flows.

Billing platform supported on Cambium QoE: 

Get the details on Sonar integration here.

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Upcoming Features

  • cnMaestro integration
  • Improved TCPO metrics
  • Time based profile rules
  • Flow prioritization
  • Dynamic bandwidth allocation to pool of subscribers
  • AP/SM discovery and rate limit support per AP
  • Automatic Congestion Management at AP level
  • Deeper application visibility
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