Point to point wireless options

[Werfetter]

A friend asked me the other day for some advice "extending the wifi from one building to the next". From my understanding, he is on a property where he has access to the Wifi in the main building but the range is just not sufficient for comfortable use in his house. He has the option (permission) to install some additional hardware to make this work.

This is mostly just for general internet use, browsing, emails, and phones (WhatsApp, etc) so latency is not the biggest consideration here.

My thoughts were to go for a line of sight wireless bridge of some sort and just adding a Wireless access point inside his house. I remember helping a friend set up something like this as an alternative for running cable between buildings when it wasnt practical or necesary. For the life of me I cannot remember what the hardware was called though.

I will be seeing the property on Saturday so I will have a better idea of what might be necessary. Any suggestions for products to look out for that might do the trick?

 

[envo]

Directional antennaes is a must. you're probably trying to think of the name 'mikrotik'

 

[JerryMungo]

Directional antennaes is a must. you're probably trying to think of the name 'mikrotik'

It depends on how far. If it's a few meters from one building to the next, just stick an access point outside one of the buildings in a weatherproof housing and run power + ethernet (or power over ethernet if it supports it) to the weatherproof box. The devices must support some sort of bridge option - that's the hardest part if you're going in cheap: making sure the two are compatible and work well together.

Include a simple drawing with distances for more useful suggestions.
Also, is speed an issue? If 10-50 Mbps or lower total bandwidth is OK on the remote end you can do this with most simple hardware. Preference goes to hardware that supports DD-WRT, OpenWRT or Tomato firmware IMO.

 

[Werfetter]

Directional antennaes is a must. you're probably trying to think of the name 'mikrotik'

Yeah definitely directional. If my memory serves they were "bullets" with a 30-degree spread. They did max 150mbps I think. I am pretty sure they were not mikrotik though. Digging deep here through memories filled with alcohol and very little sleep so I might be wrong :crylaugh:

I will have a look at MikroTik, in any case, to see what they have available thanks.

 

[Muttley]

Get 2 of these:

Ubiquiti NanoStation Loco 5GHz AC

 

[Werfetter]

It depends on how far. If it's a few meters from one building to the next, just stick an access point outside one of the buildings in a weatherproof housing and run power + ethernet (or power over ethernet if it supports it) to the weatherproof box. The devices must support some sort of bridge option - that's the hardest part if you're going in cheap: making sure the two are compatible and work well together.

Include a simple drawing with distances for more useful suggestions.
Also, is speed an issue? If 10-50 Mbps or lower total bandwidth is OK on the remote end you can do this with most simple hardware. Preference goes to hardware that supports DD-WRT, OpenWRT or Tomato firmware IMO.

I will have more info after the weekend but considering he is picking up the wifi sporadically from the main building it cannot be very far. I don't quite think 10-50mbps will be good enough. I will aim for at least 150. I think he will be willing to fork out around R2k-R2.5k for the solution if that helps.

 

[Muttley]

I will have more info after the weekend but considering he is picking up the wifi sporadically from the main building it cannot be very far. I don't quite think 10-50mbps will be good enough. I will aim for at least 150. I think he will be willing to fork out around R2k-R2.5k for the solution if that helps.

See my comment above

Also, you can use this as a guide

 

[JerryMungo]

I will have more info after the weekend but considering he is picking up the wifi sporadically from the main building it cannot be very far. I don't quite think 10-50mbps will be good enough. I will aim for at least 150. I think he will be willing to fork out around R2k-R2.5k for the solution if that helps.

Great. I found a good access point for R650 that did the job for my mom. Let me see if I can find it. IIRC it was a TP Link device.

Here it is:
https://www.bidorbuy.co.za/item/347...ireless_N_Router_High_Power_9dBi_Antenna.html

That supports a mode where it acts as an access point and a client - it attaches to the access point in the main house and allows people in the flat to connect to it. It has pretty good signal through walls too.
I had to change the channel width to 20Mhz from the default 40 to get it to work, but it works really well.

You can always introduce a directional antenna to the mix if necessary such as a small flat-panel antenna.