How to Manage a Cambium ePMP Network Without cnMaestro

If you run Cambium gear you’ve probably heard by now that the company has collapsed, and a lot of WISPs are trying to work out what that means for the ePMP radios on their towers and for cnMaestro, which most Cambium networks use for monitoring, firmware upgrades and provisioning. Several of our customers run ePMP, and we monitor it without cnMaestro, so here’s what we know as of September 30, 2026, what we’d do this week if it were our network, and what the options are for replacing each of the things cnMaestro did.

What happened to Cambium

Cambium laid off 260 people on September 11 (a little over half the company), and on September 14 its UK operating company, Cambium Networks Ltd, went into administration. That’s the UK’s version of bankruptcy protection, where appointed administrators try to sell off the business. On September 22 Airspan announced it had bought the PMP 450, PTP 670, PTP 700, cnWave and cnReach product lines, along with LINKPlanner, cnHeat and cnMaestro.

ePMP wasn’t part of that deal, and neither were the Force subscriber radios, PTP 550 or PTP 820. As of this writing nobody has announced they’re buying them. The enterprise Wi-Fi, switching and firewall lines have been discontinued.

For cnMaestro Cloud, Cambium committed to keeping it running at least through October 1, and its guidance for enterprise customers says the cloud may stop supporting enterprise devices after the end of October. For fixed wireless, Cambium pointed people at Airspan’s announcement and said separate guidance would follow. Airspan owns cnMaestro now but hasn’t said how long it’ll keep the cloud service running, or whether it will keep managing ePMP radios that it didn’t buy.

So nobody knows yet whether cnMaestro Cloud will keep working for ePMP. It’s a fairly big risk to plan around though, and everything below is worth doing either way. (If you run PMP 450, that line went to Airspan along with cnMaestro, so your situation is a bit different, but the backup advice still applies.)

What keeps working on your radios

ePMP radios store their configuration locally, so if cnMaestro goes away your APs and SMs will keep passing traffic with the settings they have now. The web interface and SSH on each radio’s management IP keep working too, and so does SNMP if you have it turned on.

What you lose is everything that happened in cnMaestro itself: the dashboards and device history, alarms, bulk firmware upgrades, configuration templates, and zero-touch provisioning of new SMs. That last one is why you’ll see distributors telling people not to factory reset any radios right now. A radio that got its configuration from a cnMaestro template won’t get it back after a reset if cnMaestro isn’t there to push it.

Things worth doing right now

Make sure you can reach every radio directly. If your techs have been getting into radios through cnMaestro rather than by IP, check that the management addresses route from your office or VPN, and that you have working admin credentials for all of them. The SMs are the easy ones to forget, especially if they were only ever set up from a template.

Pull an inventory out of cnMaestro while it’s still up. Device names, MACs, serial numbers, IPs, sites and firmware versions are all a lot easier to export now than to rebuild from the radios later.

Back up every radio’s configuration. On ePMP this is under “Tools → Backup/Restore” in the web interface, where the text option downloads an editable .json file. For more than a handful of radios it’s easier to script it over SSH with show config (the ePMP CLI only takes one command per SSH exec, so run each command as its own exec rather than chaining them). Keep the files on your own server.

Download the firmware for every model you run. ePMP firmware is on Cambium’s support site, and nobody knows how long that site will stay up now. Grab the current release and the one before it for each model, along with the release notes, and keep them on your own server.

It’s also worth thinking about spares. Nobody knows yet what the supply of ePMP APs and SMs will look like over the next year, so a few spares of the models on your towers might be a good idea, especially for busy sectors where a dead AP means a lot of phone calls.

Replacing what cnMaestro did

For most WISPs cnMaestro was doing four separate jobs, and they don’t all need the same replacement.

Monitoring and alerts. ePMP supports SNMP and Cambium publishes an ePMP MIB, so any SNMP-based NMS can poll it. LibreNMS has ePMP support built in, and several people on Cambium’s community forum have mentioned using MikroTik’s Dude with the MIB loaded. Those are fine for knowing whether a radio is up and graphing the basics. The WISP-specific parts (pinging every SM every minute, or tying each SM to the customer behind it) take a lot more setup, and we wrote about where generic monitoring stops being enough a few weeks ago if you’re weighing that option.

Configuration backups. The simplest replacement is a script that runs show config over SSH on each radio every night and commits the output to a git repository, which gives you a history and a diff between versions for free. Swift Fox does this automatically for the APs and backhauls, which is covered further down.

Firmware upgrades. Without cnMaestro, ePMP upgrades are done one radio at a time from “Tools → Software Upgrade”. If you set the upgrade option to URL and host the firmware on a web server inside your network, each radio pulls the file itself, which is a lot faster than uploading it from a laptop over a busy sector. For bulk upgrades the main option right now is cnMaestro On-Premises, which Cambium is pointing customers towards. It comes with a 90-day trial of the full feature set and then drops back to the free Essentials tier, and setting it up still needs a Cambium cloud account (Cambium calls it a Cloud Anchor), so it’s worth going in with that in mind.

Provisioning new SMs. If your installers have been relying on cnMaestro to push a template to each new SM when it first comes online, the replacement is bench configuration. Set up one SM the way you want it, download its text backup, and restore that .json onto each new SM (with the hostname, IP and anything else customer-specific edited) before it goes out on the truck. It’s a bit more work per install than zero-touch provisioning was, and it doesn’t depend on anyone else’s servers.

How we monitor ePMP in Swift Fox

We collect from ePMP radios over SSH, straight from the pingbox on your network (a free VM image, a Raspberry Pi image, a cloud tunnel through your edge router, or a $119 device), so nothing depends on cnMaestro or any other Cambium service. On a Pathbox the same collector runs on the appliance itself.

From each AP we read the station table every couple of minutes, which gives us every SM’s uplink and downlink signal, SNR, MCS, distance, and the model and firmware it’s running, along with the AP’s CPU and downlink frame utilization. New SMs show up automatically as soon as they associate. The AP’s bridge table tells us which MACs sit behind each SM, so an SM in NAT mode still gets matched to the right customer account. Every SM is pinged every minute, and the results show up in the same per-AP pinglog heat map as the rest of the network.

Frequency, channel width and capacity are polled from the APs and backhauls, and the configuration of every ePMP AP and backhaul radio is backed up automatically, with a history of changes and a side-by-side diff between any two versions.

Most Cambium networks we see also run Ubiquiti, MikroTik or Mimosa somewhere. If you end up moving to something else sector by sector (Ubiquiti, Tarana, or whatever works best in your area), all of it sits on the same network map with the same alerts during the changeover, rather than cnMaestro for one half of the network and another vendor’s dashboard for the other.

There are a couple of things we don’t do for Cambium yet. We don’t push firmware or configuration to ePMP radios, so upgrades are still done by hand or through cnMaestro On-Premises. We also haven’t had the ePMP 4500 or 4600 series on a customer network yet. They run ePMP software like the radios we already support, so we expect them to work, but we’d like to test with you before promising anything.

All of this is part of our Network Management tier at $0.75 USD per subscriber per month, and it runs alongside whatever billing system you already use. If you’re running ePMP and would like to see your network without cnMaestro in the picture, reach out and we’ll set up a trial on your network. And if cnMaestro was doing something for you that we haven’t covered here, we’d love to hear about it!