Best hardware for indoor extension of high speed wireless connection

RouterOS Wireless Networking
1

I’m in an apartment building (8 homes) where within the building the internet to the apartments is done using coax. For the current internet speed the providers offer, this is sufficient, however in the near future in our street glass fiber internet will be offered and most of the apartment would like to switch to 2-8Gbit speed connection to the internet. For the connection between the switchboard at the front door to the apartments, docsis 4 would theoretically work up to 6-8 Gbit but I’m afraid the current coax cable gives too much noise and errors and these high speeds will not be reached.
I’d be interested to know if there is a possibility to switch from cabled connections to wireless connections within the building. For outdoors there are various options to arrange for these type of connections, but for indoors I’m a bit lost. And most of the wireless products for indoors are omnidirectional instead of directional, which could theoretically improve the link speed and quality.
The problem of the building is that is has thick (medieaval) walls although floors are wood, no concrete in the building.

My question is which wireless devices would be most appropriate to arrange a connection between the switchboard at the front door and, lets say, an apartment on the 4th floor. The internet provider will deliver a router at the switchboard and the apartment owner arranges for his own router. Would wifi6 have sufficient penetration to pass 40cm thick brick walls? Are there other wireless techniques which could be used? What would be the highest speed which could be reached? Would it be a problem if several wireless devices are next to eachother in the same switchboard, like interference and so.

2

No, definitely not. If walls are not made of paper, no wireless technology can offer better performance than at least half decent wires or coax.

Beware that wired technology for speeds higher than 2.5Gbos (either ethernet over UTP or DOCSIS/MoCa over coax) is not trivial (e.g. RJ45 transcievers are running pretty hot, older coax cable might not allow high frequencies needed for high throughputs). Throughputs you’re mentioning (5Gbps or more) are best transmitted over fibre.

3

How are the coaxial cables laid?

Fiber is really thin (much thinner than a coaxial cable (or any ethernet > CAT3 cable), and can normally replace old cables in any conduit/paasage/hole, the only thing one needs to be careful with is small (very small) radius curves.

4

OK, clear, wireless is not the way to go, at the moment. Although, of course, it would be best to replace the current cables with fiber, practically that would mean substantial investments, besides the costs for the cables itself. I’m first going to investigate what the max speeds are the previously installed coax cables can provide.

Thanks for your thought!

Mike

5

Coax cables (of course it depends on the exact type and on the actual conditions they are in) can actually be very fast, up to 2.5 Gb in theory, but the quality of the cables matters, I think that realistically something around 1 GB can be achieved on any coaxial cable.

MoCA adapters/converters can be found for around 80-100 € each, if I recall correctly, so roughly 1.600 € of cost for the devices, but the issue is the very high latency,

Anyway, I don’t think that going fiber is such a large investment.

8 stretches of OM3 fiber, on average 15 m each at the most, and some 16 fusion termination.

The order of magnitude of the costs should be between 2,000 and 3,000 Euro, i.e. 300/400 € per apartment.

Loosely:
cable 8*15= 120 m * 6 € = 720 €
work 12 hours * 50 € = 600 €
pigtails/terminals + fusion 16 * 30 € = 480 €

To which you add either a fibre to ethernet converter or a router with SFP for each apartment, another 100-300 € per apartment.

All in all 5,000 Euro at a first estimation, surely not exactly cheap, but not “large”, 600-700 € per apartment, it greatly depends on which kind of contract you will have from your ISP, when the fiber arrives in your street, if all they are gonna provide is 500/200 or 1000/400 or so, it is probably not worth it.

6

@jaclaz: you’re completely right that, although the costs of the fiber-wiring will be around 600-700 Euro per apartment, this would be absulutely worth the investment, and would not be a no-go. However the owner association of the building is quite strict about hardware changes in the building. Just drilling some holes in walls and floors is not a problem, but all wiring (electricity, coax, security, frontdoor bell, etc) have been nicely built in and covered with plasterwork. The big misstake, made with was made at the last big renovation of the building, about 25 years ago, was that no proper cable ducts have been used. This means that in some places the walls and floors need to be openend, re-plastered and painted. Of course that would be best to do, also with an eye on possible future requirement, but the investment would probably between 30 and 50K, also due to municipality monumental regulations and requirements.
So for our situation a wireless indoor solution would solve a lot of trouble and money but unfortunately that appears to be not an option.
As we have coax cable to each apartment MoCA would also possibly work, but again, I’m not sure about the quality of the used cables and I’m not sure if MoCA 2.5 (or even 3.0) could be used up to the Gbit speeds. Advantage is that the coax is not used for any other signal nowadays so full bandwidth would be available for data. The only way to find out is to test, which I’m planning to do. Unfortunately I’ve not been able to find any info on (consumer) devices for MoCA 3.0, which theoretically would meet the needs.

I’ll first do some testing and report back if MoCA will solve the problem, speed- and latency wise.
Cheers!

7

I see, in historical buildings - besides the (high) costs - the paperwork/authorizations are usually an issue (please read as “huge PITA”)..

It is strange how each country has different (besides standards) local uses when it comes to wiring.
When I was living in Germany for a short period , some 30 years ago, I was astonished to see how the electrical wiring (that otherwise had very good components, in a recently refurbished apartment) had cables directly plastered in the wall, in Italy the use of conduits/pipes (and thus the possibility to change/replace cables) is something that dates back to the '60’s, I don’t think that any house built or renovated in the last 50 years or so has not this kind of electrical wiring, it is -and it is since many, many years - simply unthinkable to not use conduits.

I believe that MoCA 3.0 doesn’t really exist (yet) at least from what I can see on the MoCA Alliance site:
https://mocalliance.org/about/index.php
i.e. the “standard” exists, but devices not.

But if the cable is good enough the current 2.5 standard may well reach the 2.5 GB speed, the experiment would cost some 200 Euro or so, so I think it is worth it, better an egg today than a hen tomorrow :wink: .

In any case your use case seems more like a “professional” one than the usual single home, so rather than looking around for “consumer” products, I would try contacting people mentioned in the MoCA Access:
https://mocalliance.org/access/index.php
The Incoax people (never heard of them before BTW) seems like making suitable hardware:
https://www.incoax.com/products/