My earlier piece covered what the Cambium Networks collapse means for multifamily connectivity. This one turns to the segment that built Cambium in the first place: WISPs. It draws on the Preseem 2026 ISP Network Report and input from WISPA CEO David Zumwalt, and covers Airspan's September 22 acquisition of part of Cambium's fixed wireless portfolio.
For fifteen years, a WISP tower without a Cambium radio on it was the exception. The Canopy lineage that Motorola handed off in 2011 became the PMP 450 and ePMP families that a large share of the fixed wireless industry standardized on. That era ended on September 11.
Can Airspan turn things around?
On September 11, Cambium cut more than half its global workforce, and three days later its U.K. operating entity entered administration. On September 22, Airspan Networks Holdings announced it had acquired several fixed wireless product lines from Cambium Networks Ltd., including the PMP 450 point-to-multipoint platform, PTP 670 unlicensed backhaul, PTP 700 for defense, cnWave millimeter wave, and cnReach narrowband, along with LINKPlanner, cnHeat, and cnMaestro. More than 135 Cambium employees in sales, support, and R&D moved across. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Part of this is good news. For PMP 450, the worst case, a radio line and its controller ending up with different owners, has been avoided: the hardware, planning tools, management plane and the people who know them stay together. Operators running dense PMP 450m sectors now have a counterparty that says it will keep supporting them.
The rest is less comforting. ePMP is not part of the deal. Airspan told the trade press it is not targeting ISPs with this acquisition, though it says it will keep supporting ISP customers. ePMP is the volume product in a large share of WISP networks, and as of today it has no buyer.
The distinction matters. PMP 450 is Cambium's premium line, a direct descendant of Motorola's Canopy: a proprietary, GPS-synchronized air interface on custom silicon, available in 900 MHz, 3 GHz (CBRS) and 5 GHz, and sold into utilities and critical communications as well as WISPs. ePMP is the value line launched in 2013, built on commodity Wi-Fi chipsets with Cambium's own scheduling on top, with subscriber radios cheap enough to make it the default for cost-sensitive WISPs. The two do not interoperate, but both are managed by cnMaestro.
In other words, Airspan bought the carrier-grade line that fits its defense, critical communications, and service-provider positioning, and left behind the high-volume, low-margin line that many smaller WISPs actually run.
That choice is not surprising. Because ePMP runs on Wi-Fi chipsets, it is essentially a commodity line with little margin, and it has no real future next to the proprietary, higher-capacity systems that deliver the plans subscribers now need. It is not what operators are installing anymore. Fiber access was a bad move from the start: a crowded, commoditized market in which Cambium had no experience.
That leaves a sizable part of the portfolio without a named buyer: the entire ePMP family, including Force subscriber radios; PTP 820 licensed microwave and PTP 550 unlicensed backhaul; fiber access; and the enterprise portfolio of cnPilot Wi-Fi access points, cnMatrix switches, and NSE devices, which Cambium had already discontinued. For multifamily MSPs running Cambium Wi-Fi, the picture is unchanged. For WISPs whose backhaul rides on PTP 820 or PTP 550, support is as open a question as it is for ePMP.
So can Airspan turn this into a durable business? Given its history, I am skeptical. Airspan went public through a SPAC merger in 2021. By the third quarter of 2023, quarterly revenue had fallen to about $14 million from $39 million two years earlier, and headcount from roughly 800 to about 370. That year it sold Mimosa, the fixed wireless line it had bought in 2018 to target exactly this market, to Jio's Radisys for $60 million amid balance sheet pressure. In March 2024, it filed a prepackaged Chapter 11 that eliminated about $205 million of funded debt, emerging in October 2024 as a private company majority-owned by its lender, Fortress Investment Group.
Mimosa was Airspan's chance to prove itself in this market, and it did not pan out. I see no track record of Airspan doing what Cambium did for years: keeping product lines running, shipping steady improvements, and managing R&D over the long haul. That is not proof it can't. But the burden of proof sits with Airspan, and the verdict will come from what operators choose to deploy.
The pattern matters more than any single event. Airspan entered this market once and walked away when cash ran short. It is now buying its way back in, less than two years out of bankruptcy, with a line it positions for defense, critical communications and service providers rather than ISPs. Its growth since emerging has come largely through acquisitions: Corning's wireless business, Jabil's Open RAN radios, and now part of Cambium. Every acquired line competes for the same engineering and support budget.
There is also an uncomfortable fact: PMP 450 is the franchise Cambium itself could not make pay. Airspan takes it on without ePMP and against the same competitors: Tarana at the high end, Ubiquiti on price, and LEO at the edges of the network. Nothing about the product's economics changed on September 22. Only the owner did.
To be fair, the 2024 restructuring was a recapitalization, not a liquidation, and Airspan reports $152 million in revenue for the twelve months to June 2026, with what it calls strong profitability. But those figures are self-reported, much of the growth appears to be acquired, and a financial owner such as Fortress will eventually look for an exit.
What would change my mind? A published PMP 450 roadmap, including a successor to the 450m; a written, multi-year commitment on cnMaestro, cnHeat and firmware, covering devices Airspan did not buy; a dedicated WISP channel and support team rather than one bolted onto a 5G and defense sales force; and disclosure of what it paid and plans to invest. Until then, PMP 450 operators should treat this deal as a reprieve, not a resolution.
Squeezed from above and below: Tarana and LEO
Cambium did not fail because WISPs stopped buying fixed wireless. It failed because the fixed wireless market split in two, and Cambium held neither.
At the top end, Tarana Wireless rewrote the performance ceiling. Its ngFWA platform was built from the ground up, and its G2 platform pairs a large capacity increase with the ability to blend licensed and unlicensed spectrum in one radio. Tarana claims more than 300 customers in 24 countries, a logo wall that reads like a WISPA member directory, plus cable operators such as Mediacom, Midco, Cox and Charter that Cambium never cracked. Every one of those wins was a sector that, five years ago, would have gone to a PMP 450m or an ePMP 3000. The upgrade cycle WISPs needed to compete with fiber went to Tarana, and Cambium's answer arrived late and in fragments.
At the bottom end, LEO satellite took the marginal subscriber. Starlink did not replace WISP networks, but it removed the reason to extend them. The few unserved homes at the edge of a sector that used to justify one more ePMP access point are now served from orbit, by the household directly or by the WISP using Starlink as a stopgap. That churn is manageable for a WISP. It is fatal for the vendor that sold the low-end radios, because the "just one more sector" purchase order quietly stopped arriving.
Put the two together: Tarana took the growth spend, LEO took the fill-in spend, and Cambium was left with maintenance and replacement on an aging installed base. That is a fine business for a lean private company and a terrible one for a Nasdaq-listed company that had bet on an enterprise Wi-Fi pivot that never scaled. When supply problems then delayed deliveries into 2026, even loyal customers had every reason to try the competition, and many did.
The growth pattern in fixed wireless confirms the split. New deployment momentum is concentrated in 60 GHz and Tarana, and even Ubiquiti, the share leader, is not pushing deeper into this market.
The market Cambium was fighting over is also shrinking. The last few years have brought heavy consolidation, BEAD dollars flowing to other technologies, and direct competition from Starlink. Some WISPs are growing, but this is a difficult industry right now. None of it was sudden. Cambium's decline was a slow crash and burn over two years, and the real surprise is that it took this long.
How exposed are WISPs? What the Preseem data shows
The best public proxy for exposure is the annual Preseem ISP Network Report, which draws on billions of daily metrics from hundreds of ISPs in about 20 countries. Its customers mostly run between 100 and 100,000 subscribers, so operators in the millions are outside its view, but operators tend to put all their equipment under Preseem's management, so the data captures whole networks. The 2026 edition breaks down fixed wireless vendor share by connected subscriber radios (CPE) and by access points.
Source: Preseem ISP Network Report 2026, year-over-year comparison of CPE and AP FWA vendors. Preseem notes that these figures reflect the ISPs using its platform, not overall sales.
Three things stand out.
Four in ten fixed wireless subscribers sit behind a Cambium radio. At 39.5% of connected CPE and 28.5% of access points, Cambium is the clear number two behind Ubiquiti, and the two together account for roughly 87% of subscribers in the dataset. Tarana, for all its momentum, is at 8.3%. No version of this market makes Cambium's installed base a rounding error.
That Tarana figure surprised me, given its R&D spend. The explanation is maturity. Operators build towers first and fill them over time, so a new platform's subscriber share lags its footprint. Tarana's growth took off once BEAD-funded builds started, and a lot of deployed capacity is still waiting to be sold. I expect that 8.3% to climb.
The exposure was still growing. Cambium was the biggest share gainer in the report, up 4.1 points in CPE and 2.0 in APs, which Preseem called a resurgence of growth. Operators were adding Cambium subscribers right up to the year the company failed, so a meaningful slice of the base is recent capital not yet paid back. Installed-base share is a lagging indicator, though: it shows what operators bought, not what they will buy next.
Cambium sits in the dense sectors. Its subscriber share is eleven points higher than its AP share, the mirror image of Ubiquiti. Over 75% of fixed wireless APs in the dataset have 10 or fewer subscribers, yet the PMP 450m averages 18, with a 95th percentile of 55 and a maximum of 131, the heaviest loading alongside Tarana's densest model. The ePMP 3000 averages 12. These are the revenue sectors, each a proprietary AP with dozens of proprietary CPEs behind it, so the cost of a failed AP without a spare, and of a migration, scales with exactly the sectors that matter most.
Zumwalt's rule of thumb is that vendor share of the installed base maps reasonably well to the share of WISPA members exposed. Because most operators run more than one vendor, the share with at least some Cambium is almost certainly above 40%, while depth varies enormously. At the deep end are operators like the 9,000-subscriber WISP where Zumwalt was COO, with roughly 95% of customers on Cambium before 2022. They need a plan B now.
What operators are asking, and what the deal changes
Before the Airspan announcement, the questions reaching WISPA were measured rather than panicked: how long the gear would be supported, whether to overbuy spares, what plan B looks like, and what happens to cnMaestro and cnHeat. The deal answered some of that for PMP 450 operators: a named owner, a support team, and a management platform that stays with the radios. Some will slow their migration plans; others, given Airspan's history, will want a second platform anyway.
ePMP operators, and many smaller WISPs rely on ePMP, got no answer at all. Operators running both lines face the most awkward outcome: part of the network under a new owner, and part under nobody's. And cnMaestro now has an owner that hasn't said how long it will run it, or whether it will keep managing devices it didn't buy. We will dig into how operators are responding in our Life after Cambium webinar.
Why this hurts WISPs more than any other segment
Fixed wireless was Cambium's identity, and WISPs, who voted it WISPA Manufacturer of the Year four straight times from 2017 to 2020, were its most loyal constituency. That loyalty is now a liability, for three reasons.
First, the protocols are closed. ePMP and PMP 450 run proprietary air interfaces, so a subscriber module from one vendor does not talk to an access point from another. Replacing an AP means replacing every CPE under it, with truck rolls to every rooftop.
Second, the management plane is a single point of failure. Most Cambium networks depend on cnMaestro for provisioning, monitoring and firmware, and many on cnHeat for RF planning. Cambium has committed to cnMaestro Cloud only "at least through" October 1. Airspan has pledged to maintain it but has not said for how long, on what terms, or for which devices. The on-premises version reportedly still relies on a Cambium cloud service to add and delete devices. If these services go dark or license renewals stop, the radios keep passing traffic, but operators lose visibility and control. One industry voice has argued that whoever holds the assets should open cnMaestro or bless an OpenWiFi load, because a dead controller means forklifted networks that work fine.
Zumwalt's point here is the broader lesson: the industry has grown comfortable doing everything in the cloud, until a failure shows how little resilience there is in infrastructure you do not control. The platforms WISPs will migrate to are just as cloud-dependent.
Operators do have leverage. When Tarana launched its cloud management system, it made metrics available only through its own APIs. Operators refused to accept that, and the policy did not last; third-party platforms such as Preseem now read KPIs directly from Tarana hardware. The question to ask any vendor is no longer just "what does the controller do" but "what happens to my network, and my data, the day your cloud goes dark."
Third, spares and RMAs are now a question mark. With half the workforce gone, the team that handled returns, firmware bugs and certifications is a fraction of what it was. There is inventory in the channel today, and Cambium says it expects fixed wireless production to resume, but distributor stock of popular APs will tighten as operators build spares, and secondary-market prices will follow.
The strategic lesson, not just the operational one
The operators who thrive never bet the next fifteen years on a single input being cheap and available. Zumwalt made that point about spectrum; it applies equally to vendors. The industry is already hybrid, with roughly half of WISPA members running significant fiber alongside fixed wireless. Vendor concentration now belongs on the board agenda, alongside spectrum policy and BEAD compliance.
The second lesson is reading the signals early. I flagged Cambium as a financial risk in our multifamily industry report in February 2024, and the warning signs weren't only on the balance sheet. While Tarana spent years building a next-generation platform, Cambium's fixed wireless innovation visibly slowed. A vendor whose R&D and firmware cadence falls behind what your network will need in three years is a risk, even if its radios work perfectly today. Roadmap risk belongs on the same dashboard as financial risk.
Operator behavior is the most honest signal of all. You don't need to ask whether a product is ready for prime time; you can watch operators deploy it. And when an operator with a large base on one vendor skips that vendor's latest generation, it is signaling that it is not staying.
What WISPs should do in the next 90 days
1. Inventory your exposure. Count every Cambium AP, CPE and backhaul link, with firmware versions and subscribers per sector. Export every cnMaestro configuration and template and every cnHeat project today. Treat October 1 as your deadline.
2. Lock down management access. Confirm you can reach every radio directly by IP, that SNMP is enabled, and that you have local admin credentials that don't route through the controller. If you stand up cnMaestro on-premises, test what still works with its cloud dependencies cut off.
3. Buy the spares you can afford now. Prioritize access points over subscriber modules: an AP failure takes a sector down, a CPE failure one customer. Start with your densest sectors; a PMP 450m routinely carrying 18 to 55 subscribers is not a sector you want dark.
4. Plan the migration by sector, not by network. Nobody forklifts an entire footprint. Start where capacity is already constrained or an upgrade was planned, and pair the migration with a real service upgrade. Preseem finds that 26% of deployed APs deliver less than 10 Mbps at peak, and that subscribers on plans below about 75 Mbps would use more if they could. Those sectors were due for replacement anyway.
5. Diversify deliberately. Resist the instinct to standardize on one new vendor. Tarana is the obvious destination for CBRS and high-capacity sectors, but swapping one single-vendor dependency for another is how this story repeats in 2031. Keep a second platform for unlicensed and lower-density sectors, and treat LEO as a legitimate tool for edge cases.
6. Hold the new owner to account. Before committing new capital to PMP 450, ask Airspan for written commitments on firmware, RMAs, spares pricing and cnMaestro support, with dates attached. If you run ePMP, assume there is no buyer until one is named, and move ePMP sectors to the front of your spares and migration plan.
7. Put every vendor through the same test. Ask four questions: what happens to my network if your cloud is unavailable, can I pull performance data directly from the hardware, what your roadmap delivers in the next 24 months, and how you're funded to get there. The answers will tell you more than a spec sheet.
The bigger picture
The fixed wireless equipment market has consolidated to a handful of serious players, and the survivors now have pricing power. Expect aggressive trade-in programs, distributors pivoting shelf space within weeks, and vendors chasing Cambium's base with migration tools and financing rather than spec sheets.
For operators, the real cost isn't the radios. It is the engineering hours and customer disruption of an unplanned migration, arriving just as BEAD obligations, spectrum uncertainty and LEO competition all demand attention. Cambium's radios will keep running for years. The question is whether operators use that time to build a more resilient supply strategy, or wait for the next collapse to force the issue.
One last point. Cambium's troubles don't mean something is wrong with fixed wireless or broadband infrastructure. Maturing markets consolidate, and upheaval like this, just as the field was stabilizing, is painful. But the Preseem data makes the case in numbers: fixed wireless subscriber throughput grew 8% last year, average usage passed 14 GB per day, and latency held steady or improved. Once customer experience is controlled for, the technology behind it doesn't matter. Operators are keeping up with demand. One vendor did not.
We will host a Life after Cambium webinar featuring WISPA CEO David Zumwalt very shortly. Details to follow.