I’m helping my elderly parents modernize their home a bit. They are late bloomers, only got into tech after their retirement but are now going full-throttle.
They live in a rural area and my dad got a hobby shack that so far only has power, nothing else hooked up.
He’d like to have a connection to the shack that’s at least 1 GbE actually usable.
While I get that a fiber run would make the safest and most reliable option, the terrain sucks to dig in (thin layer of dirt with patchy grass and underneath rocks).
The shack has a direct line of sight with the main house, measured today exactly 75 m (around 250 ft.) distance between them with a Bosch laser measuring device (± 1.5 mm).
Does anyone here have personal experiences with that specific or similar devices?
At a distance of 75m/250 ft. is it realistic to get a proper 60 GHz link or will it mostly use the 5 GHz fallback option? As mentioned direct line of sight, no trees or other obstacles in that path.
Are there other/better options? My mum would accept that model since its only a little disc shape with a diameter of around 200 mm, not a large dish - that would be a no go.
Likely don’t need a full GigE speeds to a shack. Late bloomer they are probably scrolling FB or maybe listening to music.
You could get away with a much cheaper model and wouldn’t notice a difference. I don’t have any experience with that stuff personally, but that price seems a bit overkill for what you’re trying to accomplish.
Someone on here might know of a cheaper solution than ubiquiti (unless you find used for dirt cheap)
And the lightning storm thing, I mean how often is that a problem? just hook it all up with a good surge protector.
I don’t have any personal experience with the 60ghz models, but I have used the 5ghz ones for years without a single issue. I just shoot between two buildings maybe 150ft, so it is very stable and gets as good of throughput as it can for the 5ghz models which is about 650mbps. The 60ghz should be fine if you have direct line of sight. They get interrupted by a lot more, and even a single tree in the way can be an issue. They will also drop in speed a lot when it is raining a moderate amount. Other than that I bet it would work very well for you.
I would get these though and use a 24v passive poe injector with them as it saves a lot of money:
You can always use gas discharge tube type Ethernet surge protectors to isolate your RJ45 lines. Those ones are veryt fast and designed for lightning. www.amazon.com/Ethernet-Surge-Protector-Gigabit-1000Mbs/dp/B07GBLFFNK/
Place the surge protector between the switch and the passive poe injector.
I use those surge protectors at my dads house which is in the desert. They get some nasty lightning storms out there every year. Since installing those I haven’t had a single network equipment failure. I have had a couple prior to their installation from nearby strikes.
I have a pair of the AirMax 60 GHz in operation between two buildings. Distance is 74 feet and the worse speed I saw was 800MB/s in a hurricane level downpour. It handles GB speeds nicely. They are small (so unaffected by wind / weather) , easy to set up and pretty idiot proof if you follow the directions.
I happened to come across the initially mentioned Building Bridge XG purely by chance…
…maybe it’s my limited experience as a lay person but what exactly are the technological differences between the product lines “airMAX” (or “airFiber”) and “Building Bridge”?
If it’s the range I’m a bit confused why the airMAX line with potentially longer range is less expensive…?
Note: Yes, pretty strong lightning storms are a real issue where my parents live, every year next-door neighbors have issues with fried DSL internet routers or even the ISPs themselves with some roadside installations that are part of their infrastructure. They themselves have been lucky for a few years now but that’s just chance.
Yeah, I prefer the “manual gear box” of something like MikroTik switches with many years of firmware updates over something glossy, highly polished that wants dongles or god-forbid a cloud subscription etc. to function.
I’d say use something slower to day and update once there’s a need for it?
TP-Link CPE610 or CPE510 are like 85% less, if you don’t like the vendor load OpenWrt (verify support but both seem to be supported as far as I can tell) and use WDS aka “transparent link” mode.
Outdoor equipment will degrade so buying something for the future is probably not worth it.
AirMax line is 24v passive system and cannot be managed in the UniFi controller. You just log in to each unit manually and configure them. It either requires a special network switch (from Ubiquiti) with the right power output or a semi-proprietary 24v passive poe injector. This requirement isnt that bad though, the right injectors are easy to come by and a few other companies besides Ubiquiti make 24v passive injector types that are compatible.
Unifi Building Bridge is standard Poe+ powered, so can run on any switch with PoE, and also is managed and imports to the UniFi system. The Building Bridge XG also has a 10gb SFP+ port so you can get higher than gigabit speeds, unlike the AirMax model I linked that is a lot cheaper. If you already have a whole Unifi system it is nice to be able to manage a wireless bridge with everything else, but unless you have the Unifi system already or are willing to pay so much extra for an extra 500mb-1gb of speed the SFP+ gets you then you are better off going with AirMax.
Sort of true. You certainly can log into both individually, but for centralized management, you need to use UISP. I’d screenshot my set up to show you the features, but it would reveal too much about our back end links (map locations, IP’s etc.). We manage three pairs of wifi heads for different links through UISP web portal and it is seamless.
UISP is a Docker container for commercial management and not typically home use, but it is free and requires an Ubuntu OS. If I needed to do this at home, I wouldn’t hesitate to use UISP. Details in link below. I run it in a full blown VM, but you can certainly use Oracle VM, ProxMox or something similar in a pinch.
Support their old stuff for as long as feasible. They really go out of their way to do this.
VERY wallet friendly. You can get a pair of 60ghz outdoor devices for $300.
Don’t need separate unifi controllers, cloud accounts, or anything else
Mikrotik does a lot of wireless ISP business so I have to believe the 60ghz stuff is pretty solid.
Has 802.11ac fallback for when there is bad weather. Don’t know if the ubiquity gears does this too?
Cons:
RouterOS is a bit of a learning curve. If you know linux networking then its going to be straightforward as its just an API shell on top of linux and switch hardware.
Mikrotik is not the best vendor for wifi (slow to support new standards) so if you wanted a comprehensive single vendor solution for all wifi then ubiquiti is likely the better option.
Caveats:
Never personally used 60ghz equipment.
Zero obstacle penetration. Don’t let a single leaf get in the way.
Don’t forget to electrically isolate this stuff. You need a fiber converter somewhere, such as a sacrificial poe switch with fiber back to your main switch.
We run a pair of Wireless Wire Cubes ac (the non-Pro-version) at work to get off-site backups to a building 200m away through two tree canopies, connection is solid. They came paired and act as an Ethernet link if you point them at each other - including passing VLAN tags, which is to say that you don’t have to get into RouterOS any more than it interests you. If you have a 1m diameter line of sight you’ll likely be fine with the even more inconspicuous wireless wire non-cube (MikroTik Routers and Wireless - Products: Wireless Wire). I am not sure how vital it is that the shack doesn’t intermittently lose connection during the super hard rain events - personally I’d prefer to be in the house during those… That being said I haven’t seen significant dropouts on ours.
Have you considered copper Ethernet all the way? UV and step on/drive over rated cables are available and Cat6A is specified for up to 100m of 10G, if 1G is enough Cat5e will do 100m.
just wanna toss you this as i just found it, was subscribed to him but didn’t add it in my head to post it to you.
most of his videos are very “interesting” and informative
