Lessons from the Cambium collapse

Viewpoint Article

Many of the customers who chose Cambium did so for good reason. That’s what makes this sting, says Jack Raynor, president of NetExperience.

Contributed by Jack Raynor, President, NetExperience

This month, Cambium Networks eliminated 53.6% of its global workforce and placed its UK subsidiary into administration, according to the company’s own SEC filing.

Administrators are now searching for buyers for parts of the business, and the company has said it expects the remaining entities to be wound down. For the partners, resellers, and operators who built businesses on Cambium hardware, the practical questions are immediate. Who supports the deployed base? Where do firmware and security patches come from? What happens to margin if a forced re-platform lands on their own timeline and their own budget?

There’s no satisfaction in watching this play out. Many of the customers who chose Cambium did so for good reasons: competitive pricing, solid performance, and a workable margin. That’s what makes this sting: it wasn’t a bad decision. It’s the risk that comes standard with any single-vendor architecture, regardless of which vendor is chosen.

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Sept. 17: Cambium Networks enters administration

That’s the part worth sitting with. This isn’t really a story about one company’s balance sheet. It’s a recurring pattern. In 2020, pandemic-era supply shocks stranded operators standardized on hardware from vendors with concentrated manufacturing. Today, AI-driven demand for memory is pushing component costs and lead times up industry-wide, squeezing margins operators thought they’d locked in. A vendor’s financial distress is just the latest variant of a risk that has always been present: when a network depends entirely on one company’s continuity, one company’s roadmap, and one company’s supply chain, risk management has effectively been outsourced to someone else’s balance sheet.

The instinctive response is to migrate to another proprietary platform. That’s understandable, but it doesn’t resolve the underlying problem: it relocates the same single point of failure to a different vendor’s name. The network is still betting on one company’s solvency, one company’s release calendar, one company’s supply relationships. If this year has proven anything, it’s that “established vendor” is not the same as “safe vendor.”

This is precisely the scenario the OpenWiFi Project was built to address. Rather than bundling hardware, firmware, and controller into one vendor’s decision, OpenWiFi decouples them: certified white-box access points validated across multiple ODMs and silicon vendors, an open, community-governed management protocol (uCentral), and a choice of commercial or private-cloud controllers that can be swapped without touching a single access point. If one hardware supplier exits the market, tightens supply, or runs into financial trouble, the fleet isn’t stranded, because no single company was ever the whole architecture.

For Cambium’s current customers, that flexibility may run deeper than a future buying decision. It’s worth examining, pending the necessary technical and legal groundwork, whether currently deployed Cambium access points could run OpenWiFi firmware. If so, and with Cambium’s cooperation, affected operators would only need to choose an OpenWiFi-compatible controller, not replace hardware already sitting in their sites. That path isn’t confirmed, but it deserves a look before anyone assumes a full rebuild is the only option.

That’s a materially different risk profile than choosing between competing closed platforms. It doesn’t eliminate business risk; it distributes it, the way any resilient supply chain distributes single points of failure, so one company’s setback doesn’t become every customer’s unplanned capital expense.

None of this is said with any pleasure about what Cambium’s employees and partners are going through. Job losses and forced re-platforming decisions are genuinely hard, and they deserve real support, not a sales pitch dressed up as sympathy. But the industry has now watched this pattern repeat across a pandemic, a component shortage, and now a vendor’s insolvency. Each time, the operators most exposed were the ones with the least architectural flexibility.

As the industry absorbs this news, the more useful question isn’t which vendor to move to next. It’s whether that next platform decision recreates the same dependency or removes it. Open, disaggregated architectures like OpenWiFi won’t prevent the next disruption; nothing can promise that. But they change what a disruption costs: a supplier swap, not a forced, unplanned rebuild.

Jack Raynor served as chair of the TIP OpenWiFi Project and currently sits on the OpenLAN Project Steering Committee. He is president of NetExperience, a founding member of the OpenWiFi community. He welcomes questions and discussion at Jack.Raynor@NetExperience.com.

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