Is hAP be lite a nonsense?

Hardware
21

I have Cat 5e running radially from a fairly central point in my house. From industry data I am very confident it would handle 10 Gb/s up to 30m although its actual requirement is an iPerf-verified 2.5 Gb/s. As also commented, every component in the chain has to meet a given requirement. My CRS304 switches do not make the 2.5 Gb connections go faster.

ETA: my son chose fibre. For one thing it is more discreet when run down a door frame or in a wall corner, there being other constraints in his house.

22

But I ran fibre cables too between CRS310 switches and a router, cat. 7 is for WiFi only.

23

CAT7 just for a WiFi ? And then you need to terminate that cable at the AP... You enjoy the pain ? :rofl:

And then you put be lite on it... BE3 is the device for you...

24

I don't see a problem with that. There are wall outlets and there are patch cables. At the moment, I've installed cat. 6 outlets and thats enough for 2.5GbE ports in CRS310. For me, the most important thing was to run the best cabling available today so I won't have to open up the walls again in 2, 3, or 5 years. I simply don't like doing the same job twice. If you're not a millionaire, you buy the best you can afford so you don't have to buy it twice :laughing:

25

Still, going Cat7 remains (IMHO) excessive.

I cannot imagine (yeah, I am a little short at imagining) a house where you have a longer than 50 meter stretch of cable, and up to 55 m or so Cat6 can go 10 Gb just fine.

Please note how this article comes from people that sell cables:
https://fycables.com/cat6-vs-cat7-balancing-cost-performance-for-home-networks/
that would have every reason to promote the more expensive cable.

26

of course, I am aware of that. should I now rip the walls and install cat. 6? :sweat_smile:

27

Of course not, you made a choice (poor as it might be) and you are righteously defending it.

I like coherence. :slightly_smiling_face:

28

I am sorry for starting all this off-topic talk about cables and wouldn't mind if "supreme powers" were to delete all of this :slight_smile:

Back to "be lite", I've got two of those last week, configured them under hap ac2 Capsman and they are running fine (without MLD - still have to find a client that would support that).

Wifi speed is the same as before (my DL is 700Mbps and hap ac2 could saturate it with qcom-ac drivers), but at least "be lite"'s are not randomly rebooting...

29

Should be: rich as it might be :slight_smile:

30

I think I will go with be3 media and the main reason for that is PoE IN and 2.5GbE port. I was also considering hAP ax2 as other people proposed but that would be a change for the sake of change, with no real benefits (except capsman vs. classic mesh). I've seen someone reporting it overheating anyway.

31

What money we are talking about if we compare ~30m of cat. 6 vs. cat. 7?

32

I’m using MikroTik products since 2019, the hardware is great. Many complaints about wireless signal like MikroTik designs they own radio chips, they aren’t. A wireless radio module they use isn’t built by MikroTik, they buy parts and assemble them, and the end product is seriously good to what I use it for. Not all parts they use are high quality though, an antenna they stock access points with is terrible, very low quality and is the weakest point on both RB4011 and AX^3 based on my tests.

I was considering the hAP ax3, but on paper it doesn't seem to offer any significant improvement over my Mercusys access points in terms of performance or antenna gain

I went shopping around and found good replacement antenna for AX^3, much better and more consistent wireless signal with it now. If anyone is interested, this is the model I use for over a year now - ALFA ARS-WiFi6E-M2. I keep collecting wireless signal from all wireless clients regularly, every 10 seconds, and see pretty good record of how this antenna performs over time