I’m looking for recommendations for a wireless bridge, something which can connect to an arbitrary WiFi network (specifically a mobile hotspot) and bridge it to a wired Ethernet network. Ideally something which is powered by PoE.
I start with the list of OpenWRT supported devices, ignore devices that don’t provide at least “ac” Wi-Fi, and then check prices.
Maybe the vendor firmware will be decent and you can use it as-is without the extra work, but having OpenWRT as an option ensures you’ll never get stuck with an unusable device due to bad software the vendor won’t support/update.
If you’re ok with 5GHz … these are interesting:
The high directional gain makes for a stable connection through walls and similar (+21db is a lot).
If you don’t like router os, you can load OpenWRT over tftp on it.
How come you need this thing?
Did you find one? I am also looking for one.
So this will connect to a regular WiFi network?
This will be used to use my phone as a backup internet connection for my home network. Currently I’m using an old USB WiFi dongle which works but the connection isn’t great.
Yes, it’ll do plain old 802.11 … but it’s 5GHz only.
If I may ask, why don’t you USB tether your phone to your router?..
(guessing: router is in the basement and phone has no cell tower reception there?)
Well there’s not much point having internet if I don’t have my phone handy 
I don’t know how well that Mikrotik will work if you end up moving your phone around much… the antenna pattern is very narrow and very directional (21 dbi), that’s what gives it the high gain/high range, which is great for long distances and/or punching through concrete and plaster, or connecting to tiny cell phone PCB antennas.
If you don’t care to “point your signal” much… so that you can walk around from one part of the house/apartment to the other while staying connected, you probably want something less pointy.
A generic random OpenWRT based router supports “client mode”, and will work for this assuming there’s enough signal quality, … that might be a useful thing.
… or maybe if you want something less pointy then something less directional with lower gain will work better … Mikrotik sxt sq5ac is only 16dbi (vs 21dbi of the disc lite 5), which gives you a much wider cone to aim. Think e.g. 150square meter single level square-ish apartment, you put it in one corner and aim through the center of the apartment diagonally to get the 90degree “field of view experience”. (not how it actually works but hard to explain … there’s a lot more obstacles like furniture and stuff down the middle usually.
Reason I’m interested in this is that my own fallback plan is:
a) short term… tether laptop to phone over wifi so I can work
b) long term … in case it’s multiple hours, pop out a sim and use a 5G USB dongle plugged into my router.
I used to have a dedicated wifi hotspot as a backup a few years ago, not phone . but that’s now too old to be useful… but worked great. (I’m lucky I have good 5G reception near my current router).
I thought about getting a second sim for backup internet but it’s not really worth the cost for me. The USB thing works okay but the signal is not great. But yeah I’m after something omnidirectional, so I guess something I can put openwrt on is the best option.
I am pretty sure that you can use these the way that you want to and they are cheap. You just will need a router behind them.
Otherwise look at peplink/pepwave routers as those are specifically set up to do WiFi WAN with cellular backups.
Does litebeam do 802.11 or only air max … I know between nanobeam and litebeam … one of the two didn’t do 802.11 and only did airmax but I forgot which one.
PtP is proprietary but I think you can use it as a WiFi client device as well.
Buy it off Amazon and worst case scenario you just return it.
Note any MikroTik can do WiFi bridging, you don’t need a Point-to-Point model. They’re all fully capable of the configuration, the model difference is just about hardware.
If low-voltage passive PoE is ok, then a hAP ac lite or hAP ac² would do the job, depending on phone WiFi hardware and expected data bandwidth. If you need 48V 802.3af/at support, then a cAP ac or wAP ac would work.
The catch for this kind of bridging in general is that the 802.11 standard doesn’t support multiple devices behind a single WiFi client, so transparent connectivity options are very limited.
In similar situations I’ve found it easier to treat the hotspot WiFi more like the public Internet connection, and run full NAT + DHCP for the ethernet devices instead — AKA typical “router” mode instead of bridging.
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