Latest Release Firmware & Powerbeams

The PowerBeam devices were not stable when they tried to go to 1Gb Ethernet speeds.  Connections were lost and the port would bounce between 100Mb and 1Gb.   This was possibly due to lengthy cat6 cables up towers.   Given this instability, the port on the PowerBeam was set to 100Mb.  Generally, this does not present a problem as the RF link would be the bottleneck -- the max is 144Mbs 802.11n, but this is half duplex with CSMA, thus would not exceed an Ethernet Full Duplex at 100Mbs.     The recent change fixed issues with PBM not working with some switches.    Long story short, if all switches are able to do auto negotate, then we'll always end up with 100Mbs negotiated speed. 

Joe AE6XE

Note: Devices with 1Gb interfaces will accept power passive +(4,5), -(7,8) 2 pair Poe... Let it be known, they may require passive power on all 4 pairs +(1,2)(4,5)pins, -(3,6)(7,8)pins. Devices that require 2 pair Poe can safely pull power from a Nanoswitch that being suppled 4pair passive poe. 

I use edgeswitches to supply 2pair Poe, they don't supply passive power on all 4 pairs. ES's do have 1Gb ports! I had to add a "Tycon Power Systems POE-INJ-1000-WTx Gigabit PoE Injector/Splitter 4 Pair" To send 4pair passive power up the line to a nanoswitch with an AirFiber3x and PowerBeam 5ACgen2. The AF3x's symptom was that at power levels above 40dbm BLAM Node reboots and keeps doing sow until the power level is lowered before it reboots again! LOL! The PowerBeam 5ACgen2 never had a problem! 4pair injector fixed the problem!

It must be some of the board revisions, including the AirFiber equipment that require 4pair and not 2 pair passive poe to run a full power/ run at all!

Could your radio need a 4pair injector? 

To append to the history on this issue. A couple of years ago the performance issue with gigabit and the PB M5 400 was discovered. Symptoms were poor layer 2 performance on the ethernet link due to timeouts, framing errors, and retransmits. Physical cabling and power were not the cause. It affected only certain models of gigabit switches, if I remember, MikroTik, some HP, some ToughSwitches, as well as some laptop NICs (i219?). Back then the AREDN firmware was then set to lock the PowerBeam's port to 100/Full, no auto-negotiate and this solved the issue, provided the user also set 100/Full on their switch. Between 3.22.6.0 and 3.22.8.0 it was set back to auto-negotiate due to the link not coming up on some switches without Auto being on (and some cheap switches not having settings otherwise). However the advertised speed from the node is now only 100Mbps, no gigabit as that underlying issue is still there in the Powerbeam. So the short version is: Put your switches back to Auto-Negotiate before upgrading. Ian AJ6GZ

Disabling auto-negotiation on the PowerBeams and forcing the speed to 100Mbps was always a problematic solution. Instead we changed it to only support 100Mbps and allow auto-negotiation, which is what every switch out of the box will be happy with. Ethernet always wants to auto-negotiate the speed (not doing this isn't even an option at higher speeds) so while there's some short term pain here, the result is what we should have always done and will certainly be better for new installs.