Network problems with wireless bridge, Help!?

Ok, I have a fifteen-year old wireless bridge that for about 12 years consisted of two hawking panel antennas and a pair of cheep Airlink 101 AP 's, they had bridge mode. The APs lived in a dusty hot out buildings and saw everything from 15 degrees to 110 degrees. I replaced the Airlinks with some $15 Netis WF2411. They suck and need restarted once a week, and I am losing about 80% speed over the network after an ISP change to 50Mbps connection that delivers 25 on average. The Airlinks I saw a 10% loss. The Netis AP’s do not have bridge mode, so I am useing AP/Client mode.

Anyone dealt with this kind of thing? Any help appreciated

What’s the distance? How much throughput do you need? Have you considered modern compact 60GHz gigabit bridges or is that overkill (<$200)?

Distance is about 350 feet, both antennas are on roof tops , on posts to clear trees and such. If I could get close to that 50Mbps, even half I would be happy. 60GHz would be ideal, but is not in the cards right now. I am looking for cheep and good enough for now.

These are 60GHz at around 150/pair, with everything you need in the box.

Ubiquiti has these “5ac loco” units at 40 a piece, half price of the above for the pair, they’re cheap because they’re 2015era mips74k designs… but the radio and radio software is good on them. Since you seem in the US (previous posts) loco units might be easier to get maybe.

Both of these devices are built for outdoor mounting - e.g. strap them on a pole and aim roughly (they even give you plastic zip ties in the box). Power then through poe that’s in the box. Neither of the two is using WiFi, so you don’t need to deal upstream clogging downstream latency and all that stuff.


Normally I’d be asking what software are you running on the wf2411 - perhaps openwrt in which case there’d be a way to enable a lot more verbose logging, but with 4MB flash / 16MB ram I’m guessing they’re running probably an ancient kernel and/or maybe even vxworks - which is just hopeless. don’t think there’s much you can do to debug the issue… and it could be really anything, from weird interference confusing the radios (tried different channels? or narrower channels)? to software bugs, to e.g. bad ram on the device.

Not to sound condescending, but at this point I’m more curious about the circumstances causing you to spend hours on an issue that’s likely to be solvable by 100-150 in hardware,… I mean, I’m guessing there’s a reason why those, not so good 10 year old wf2411 that cost 2 starbucks coffees each, and seem to be worth even less are worth debugging?

Well, I am a unique combo of cheep and broke, I wanted to make what I had work. I had not seen the umbiquity units at that price. My worry is that the temps they will see will be close to the rated 150 degrees F. Thanks for the advice.

I was looking here: https://store.ui.com/collections/operator-airmax-devices/products/nanostation-loco5ac

(Wow, eurusd is 1.23 now, must be all the corona bailouts, if you’re in Europe, go buy tech now before it bounces)