Reading Ubiquiti’s airMAX “Vintage / Obsolete” Lists: Item-by-Item Comparisons for NS5, Rocket M5 and PowerBeam 5 GHz Gear, and How to Migrate Off Them

The Official Position: How Ubiquiti Defines “Vintage” and “Obsolete”

Ubiquiti’s Help Center article on vintage and obsolete products manages the product lifecycle through a two-tier status model (Cambium ePMP and MikroTik run similar programmes, covered in the 5 GHz end-of-life replacement guide). The definitions, quoted verbatim, are:

The vendor’s broader statement on product retirement, also verbatim: “Ubiquiti is committed to product innovation and providing quality technical support to our customers, which means that sometimes discontinued products will no longer be supported. This page is intended to help customers transition.” The English page adds: “some older products will eventually stop being manufactured and will no longer receive full software updates.” Ubiquiti also commits that “all Ubiquiti products sold will continue to be covered under warranty for the warranty period or as required by law.”

Two points need to be stated clearly. First, Ubiquiti does not explain why any individual model was retired, and it does not use language like “this entire series has stopped shipping,” so this article offers no speculation about motives — every judgement below rests solely on the two official tiers. Second, “Obsolete” does not mean the hardware stops working tomorrow. The unit will keep forwarding traffic, but it is running unprotected: no security patches, no official repair channel, and when it fails, it fails for good.

The 5 GHz SKUs on the Official Lists, Checked One by One

The table below lists only airMAX-related SKUs that actually appear on Ubiquiti’s official page, together with the status shown there. Anything the vendor does not list is omitted and given no verdict:

Note what the “Suggested Replacement” column really says: against every airMAX SKU, Ubiquiti names only the product family (airMAX / airFiber), with no model-by-model substitution. That differs from the UniFi line, where the guidance points you to a page for choosing a replacement. In short, Ubiquiti provides no per-model replacement guidance for airMAX. That is precisely why this document exists — to lay the specs side by side and work the numbers for you.

Master Replacement Mapping

How the classes are defined. Direct replacement = form factor, interface and gain tier all line up, link budget and coverage essentially unchanged. Partial replacement = the link budget must be re-checked against the original model’s official gain, or an external antenna is required. No equivalent = LigoWave has no matching product tier, and this article says so outright rather than recommending a stretch.

Spec Comparisons, Item by Item

The tables below do one thing: they place the figures published in Ubiquiti’s official datasheets alongside the figures from LigoWave’s official datasheets. Where neither vendor publishes a number, the table says “see official datasheet” rather than filling the gap on the vendor’s behalf.

6.1 Integrated CPE: NS5 / Loco5 / NS-5ACL vs LigoDLB 5-15ac

6.2 Connectorised: Rocket M5 (RM5-Ti / RM5-GPS) vs LigoDLB 5ac

This is the most straightforward replacement in the airMAX installed base: Rocket M5 units almost always carry an AM-5G series antenna with N-type connectors, so the antenna, feed line and tower position all stay exactly where they are — you unbolt the Rocket M5, bolt on the 5ac, and pick up 3 dB of extra transmit power. The real work is in two places: re-doing the weatherproofing on the N connectors when you swap them, and the protocol — the Rocket M5 runs airMAX TDMA while the 5ac runs iPoll 3, so both ends have to change together. There is no “swap one end” middle ground.

6.3 Base stations / sectors: Rocket M5 + sector antenna vs LigoDLB 5-90AC

Start with Ubiquiti’s own sector antenna figures. The gain and beamwidths of the official airMAX sector antennas (including the azimuth and elevation angles at the 6 dB definition) are below — and this columns bears directly on how coverage changes after replacement:

The other difference is elevation: 4° against 20°. That sounds like LigoWave “covers wider, therefore better,” but do not jump to that conclusion — a narrow 4° elevation concentrates energy for long-range coverage over flat ground, and near-in users below the sector were already being served by sidelobes. Going to 20° elevation clearly helps close-in users with large height differences, while trimming peak gain in the boresight direction. Which one suits you depends on whether your users are “scattered across flat ground 5 km out” or “crowded into a town below the tower.” That is an engineering trade-off, not a case of one being better than the other.

6.4 Dishes / long range: PowerBeam vs LigoDLB 5-20ac or 5ac + external dish

The official PowerBeam M series figures (gain, transmit power, power consumption) are below:

6.5 High-gain bridges: NanoBeam / airGrid / NanoBridge

The rule at this tier is simple: at 20 dBi and below, a LigoWave integrated radio can substitute directly; above 20 dBi, you must go connectorised with an external antenna. The NanoBeam and LiteBeam 16 dBi tiers map to the 5-15ac and the 19–23 dBi tiers to the 5-20ac, with 1–3 dB of error either way that a single link-budget pass in section 6.6 will settle. For the airGrid and the 22/25 dBi NanoBridge tiers, the honest answer is that “this is external-antenna work.”

6.6 Platform-level summary: airMAX M generation / AC generation vs LigoDLB 5ac series

Six Decision Dimensions Beyond the Spec Sheet

Gain and throughput can only answer “will this device work.” They cannot answer “is this project worth doing.” In real replacement projects, the six dimensions below often carry as much weight as the RF figures.

Dimension 1: Wireless protocol and scheduling

This dimension is a draw — airMAX and iPoll 3 are both proprietary TDMA implementations, each closed. The real distinction is that Ubiquiti’s own airMAX ac will not interoperate with the older M generation either, which means the first-party Ubiquiti path also requires paired replacement and offers no more room for a phased transition than switching to LigoWave does. So protocol incompatibility is not an extra penalty for changing brands; it is a constraint built into the airMAX system itself. If your network runs airMAX (you can see the airMAX toggle in the airOS interface), plan for whole-link, paired cutovers.

Dimension 2: Power and site modification cost

This is the most practical advantage in the Ubiquiti replacement scenario: the vast majority of airMAX generations (Rocket M5, PowerBeam, NanoBeam, NanoStation) run 24 V passive PoE, which matches LigoDLB’s power scheme exactly, so injectors carry straight over. That is the opposite of the Cambium situation (802.3af/at, which does require modification — see the Cambium ePMP 5 GHz replacement guide) and is the basis for rating the Ubiquiti article’s modification burden as “low.” One operating caution: LigoDLB is 24 V passive, so do not connect an 802.3af switch’s 48 V output directly to it — the voltage mismatch carries a risk of damage. The correct approach is to disable PoE on the switch port and power the radio through a 24 V injector.

Dimension 3: Management and bulk operations

Ubiquiti uses UISP (formerly UNMS) for centralised management; LigoWave uses WNMS. Both platforms handle bulk configuration pushes, firmware upgrades and status monitoring at a broadly similar level of capability — this is not a dimension where we claim WNMS as an advantage; it is a like-for-like substitution. The real difference is team habit. If your operations team has already built alerting, reporting and automation workflows on UISP, moving to WNMS carries migration and relearning cost that belongs in the project hours. Conversely, if the team has no unified management platform at all and relies on logging into each airOS web interface to change configuration, switching to WNMS is an upgrade in how the network is run. To give credit where it is due, UISP’s maturity and community resources are genuine Ubiquiti assets and should honestly be entered as a reason to stay rather than reduced to a discontinued-product label.

Dimension 4: Lifecycle and supply certainty

NS5 and Loco5 are already at the official “Obsolete” tier: no feature or security updates, no longer officially sold, potentially partially or entirely unsupported in future releases. A large set of models — Rocket M5, PowerBeam, airGrid, NanoBridge and others — sit at “Vintage,” which officially means “will be discontinued or is no longer actively developed, but remains purchasable and supported.” Both tiers point the same direction: this equipment is on the downward slope of its lifecycle. The LigoDLB 5ac series is in production and continues to ship firmware. For a carrier-grade link, “a guaranteed new unit within two weeks of a failure” is itself part of the availability metric, so estimate your risk exposure once as failure rate × supply lead time rather than hunting for stock after something fails.

Dimension 5: Evolution path (6 GHz)

The airMAX line itself has no 6 GHz fixed-wireless models. Ubiquiti’s 6 GHz capability shows up in UniFi Wi-Fi products (such as the UniFi U7 Pro Outdoor, which officially is limited to FCC/IC regions and requires AFC) — that is Wi-Fi access, not an airMAX-style point-to-point or point-to-multipoint fixed-wireless platform. On the LigoWave side, the LigoDLB 6 series (5.9–6.4 GHz) shares the same hardware platform, the same iPoll 3 protocol and the same WNMS management as the LigoDLB 5ac — moving from 5 GHz to 6 GHz is a frequency migration within one platform, not a change of system. 6 GHz regulation varies by country (5925–7125 MHz is not open for civilian use in mainland China), so whether this dimension applies to you depends on your market. Confirm local rules first.

Dimension 6: Procurement and spare-parts cost structure

For discontinued and vintage models, the “list reference price” no longer tells you anything useful — the real acquisition cost depends on channel inventory and batch, and can carry either a premium or a discount, so this article invents no specific numbers. What can be stated is the difference in cost structure: the LigoDLB 5ac and LigoDLB 6 series share a platform, a management system (WNMS) and a 24 V power scheme across the whole range, so spares can be shared across models and the warehouse does not have to hold stock separately for every SKU. With a mixed airMAX vintage/obsolete estate, every SKU needs its own stock, and the more varied the model list, the more capital is tied up in spares. When you build the annual spares budget, the product “number of SKUs × stock depth per SKU” should be as small as possible — that is a question of product-line strategy, not of unit price.

How to Calculate the Link Budget (Do This Before You Order)

Any time replacement changes gain or transmit power, the link budget has to be worked through again. Running the numbers beats guessing. The method has four steps, and every input comes from the official figures already listed above.

Step 1: Calculate free-space path loss (FSPL)

Taking 5.8 GHz (f = 5800 MHz) as the example, across five typical distances:

Step 2: Calculate received signal level (RSL)

Cable and connector loss is taken as 1 dB for connectorised scenarios. Both worked examples below use real models that appear earlier in this article:

Reading the results directly: ① the 10 km base-station scenario — the LigoDLB 5-90AC + 5-15ac option comes in about 1 dB below the Rocket M5 + AM-5G20-90 option, essentially equal. But that is only “just barely working,” because LigoWave’s official PtMP coverage guidance for the 5-15ac is 5 km, and 10 km sits outside its comfort zone. In practice you should step the CPE up to the 5-20ac and recover 5 dB with 20 dBi. ② the 20 km dish scenario — the integrated 5-20ac’s RSL (−69.8 dBm) is already below the roughly −64 dBm needed for the 80 MHz high-throughput tier, so the link will drop rate. The 5ac reusing the original 29 dBi dish (−49.8 dBm) not only holds the link but comes in 3 dB better than the original PBE-M5-620 arrangement — which is the quantitative case for “connectorised radio + reused feed” being superior to an integrated radio at the long-range tier.

Step 3: Set the replacement tier from the gain difference

Step 4: Three checks that are easy to skip

• Fresnel zone: the first Fresnel zone radius is r = 17.32 × √(d/4f) (metres, with d in km and f in GHz). On a 5.8 GHz / 10 km link, the first Fresnel zone radius at the midpoint is about 11 metres — confirm before replacing that at least 60% of this region is clear of obstruction. Obstruction hurts a link more than a gain shortfall does, and no change of model fixes it.
• Coverage change from beamwidth: going from the NS-5ACL’s 45° to the 5-15ac’s 35°, or from the AM-5G20-90’s 6 dB definition to LigoWave’s 3 dB definition, both move the effective coverage boundary. Identify the original network’s edge users before replacing and test them specifically afterwards.
• Regulatory power: a change in the sum of the two ends’ gains changes EIRP, so after replacement re-check the transmit power setting against your local 5 GHz EIRP limit and dial it down in the device if needed — especially with high-gain combinations such as a 5ac (≤30 dBm) plus a 29 dBi dish.

Deployment Scenarios and Three Routes

Boiling all of the above down into three executable routes, ordered from least to most work:

Mapped onto specific business cases, the most common combinations are:

• Campus and school 5 GHz coverage backhaul: bulk-replace NS5 / Loco5 / NS-5ACL with the 5-15ac, managed centrally through WNMS so that firmware upgrades and configuration pushes across hundreds of units no longer require logging in one by one.
• ISP access-network CPE platform: upgrade Rocket M5 + sector base stations to 5-90AC (base station) + 5-15ac (CPE). Note that for PtMP links beyond 10 km the CPE should step up to the 5-20ac.
• Multi-point video surveillance backhaul: replace PBM5 / PBE-5AC with the 5-20ac or 5ac + dish antenna, and enable QoS (L2 CoS / L3 ToS-DSCP, WRR) to protect video priority.
• Utility, water and oil private networks: for connectorised Rocket M5 / Bullet M5 sites, move to 5ac + the existing antenna, leaving the feed line and tower untouched and keeping the outage window to a minimum.

Strengths and Limitations

Five strengths that hold up

1. Zero power modification: the vast majority of airMAX units are 24 V passive PoE, identical to LigoDLB, so injectors and cabling carry straight over — the single biggest implementation advantage of the Ubiquiti scenario over the Cambium one.
2. Existing feed lines can be reused (connectorised and long-range tiers): the N-type antennas on Rocket M5 and Bullet M5, and the dishes and high-gain antennas on the PBE-M5-620 / NB-5G25, can all stay, with only the radio head replaced — which minimises both the work and the outage window.
3. A complete product ladder: 15 dBi wide beam, 20 dBi narrow beam, an 18 dBi integrated 90° sector base station, and a connectorised platform — one platform covering both CPE and base-station sides, with no need to cobble together third-party antennas.
4. A defined 6 GHz evolution path: the airMAX line has no 6 GHz fixed-wireless models, whereas the LigoDLB 6 series shares platform, protocol and management with the 5ac — a ready-made evolution path in regions where 6 GHz is available.

Three limitations, stated plainly

Migration Plan (Six Phases)

This process is sequenced around “work it out first, validate at small scale, then roll out in bulk,” and every step has defined inputs, outputs and exit criteria. Networks of ten sites or fewer can merge phases two and three; networks of a hundred or more should follow the order strictly.

Per-site cutover checklist (printable)

References

1. Ubiquiti Help Center article on vintage and obsolete products (the two-tier definitions and the official SKU lists): help.ui.com
2. Ubiquiti official datasheets by model: NanoStation 5 / NanoStation AC, NanoBeam, PowerBeam, Rocket M, Bullet M, LiteBeam and the airMAX Sector Antenna series (dl.ubnt.com)
3. LigoWave official datasheets (LigoDLB 5ac / 5-15ac / 5-20ac / 5-90ac, download.ligowave.org): download.ligowave.org

All specifications, official statuses and quoted text in this article were verified on 2026-09-14. Vendor policies can change, so re-check both vendors’ latest pages before publication or submission to a tender.

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