I’m kinda new to the whole Mikrotik world so forgive me if i’m asking an absolute noob question.
I have a 100m ptp wireless link made of 2 Ubiquiti NBE 5 AC 16dBi devices. There is line of sight and not much interference in the 5GHz band so they are mostly talking very close to their nominal maximum speed, but i’d like a little more bandwidth between the two points. In my country 60GHz ptp links are required to be registered with the relevant authority and a monthly fee is needed to be paid, which i’d like to avoid, so no wireless wires or building bridges for me.
Therefore i’m thinking about buying two mANTBox ax 15s devices and using them in a back to back configuration. The link is currently passing multiple vlans, of which some have predictable low bandwidth but constant traffic. I’d like to form two bridges, one using the 2.4GHz radios and another the 5GHz ones and put the predictable traffic on the former and the rest on the latter.
My questions are: in your opinion, is this a viable idea at all?
Can these devices form the described dual band bridges?
Can i route the traffic of specific VLANs through one or the other of them utilising some bridge VLAN filtering magic?
Is it reasonable to expect a higher overall real world IP throughput than the ~300Mbit/s that i’m getting now?
what country is that? are you sure 60ghz isn’t “free” for personal use?
that being said - a low power 60ghz link is almost impossible to “discover” unless you’re really in line of sight for those few 100s meters in front of it. if you put the devices on the fasade and not on the roof, it’s almost impossible to notice the link unless someone specifically goes there to check.
i’d go for wireless wire kit.
On one end i can put the device on the facade of the building but on the other end I need a 2 meter long pole on the top of the roof for LOS. Behind that pole there is a high antenna mast / mobile base station a few degrees off maybe 400 meters away. Without that i’d probably try my luck and never get caught, but i’m worried i might cause interference to something on that mast, get my behind reported and fined.
i was quite sure in whole EU are the same rules, even italy dropped licensing for 60ghz and is now free for everyone.
wireless wire doesn’t reach 400m… it’s too low power…
ps mobile towers don’t use 60ghz, they mostly use licensed links around 80ghz.
Not to get political or anything but a lot of things are different around here from the rest of the EU.
Anyway, thanks for the suggestion, but back to the original question: can the mANTBox ax 15s act as both an AP and a client and pass VLAN tagged traffic on both bands?
Can i direct the traffic through either the 2.4G or the 5G bridge based on the VLAN tag?
If anyone has knowledge regarding those questions, please step forward
You should not adapt these devices to do something they are not designed to do. They are not designed to work as bridges, they are access points. They have a directional pattern of about 90 degrees.
Any suggestions what i could get instead if i want to avoid the 60GHz band and I’d like to get more than 500Mb/s real bandwidth?
As an avid diyer i never shied away from using things differently from what the manufacturer intended (as long as this didn’t create a dangerous situation). Back in the beginning of time i used to run this link on a TL-WR741 with an omnidirectional antenna and a WRT54GL with (i guess) DDWRT and an unknown gain external antenna on the roof in the 2.4G band, and i enjoyed all the 11 Megabits/s that setup got me. I figured the distance is small and interference is low so the sector antennas could handle the situation. My question is mainly about whether the software on these devices can do what i want them to do. But thanks for your input, it is appreciated.
well, it’s not that it wouldn’t work… in terms of antenna. just that you’d be putting your signal around way too much, and also picking up noise from all around. a dedicated ptp antennas like lhg52ac would be better suited, but yes, they don’t exist with ax.
i never worked with wave2 drivers so… should be possible yes, why not, different bridges with different vlans and each with different wlan radio. should work.
btw i’ve read that those mantboxes come with hardcoded ant gain already in software. means that out of the box they’re 15dBm less powerful than just ax boards, to comply with the EIRP rules.
I am using mANTbox AX 15s in such configuration - to make a simple bridge between two buildings - 300m distance. Yes, we have some leaves in between but I am quite sad about performance - we are not able to get more than 200/300 Mbps over this link. I stumbled upon your post by searching the option to get some more power out of this boxes…
Or maybe there is a misconfiguration that I would like to solve…
Thank you for the info! I wouldn’t mind the power cap as i intend to comply with rules. The last thing i want is a fine for not doing so. I know that the risk of getting caught is low but still.
Speaking of better suited hardware, i see MT has a product named “NetBox 5 ax” with the possibility to attach an external antenna. I can only find the “mANT30” in MT’s offerings that would fit it, but it’s huge and frankly seems like a bit of an overkill. Do you know of any 3rd party antennas that i could use?
Well, your problem is probably the leaves, afaik 5G doesn’t like those. And the antenna probably matters a lot more on that 300m distance than in my intended use case.
Did you, by any chance measure the throughput in a lab setting before installing the devices on their final place?
On the “pole” side, I understand the need of a “dedicated” device, but on the “building” site you could consider using an indoor device (if you can place it near enough the antenna) and an antenna cable, I think that up to a few meters length (I believe a cable up to 5 mt or so should be fine) there won’t be issues.
Yes, it is 5G only. The 2.4G is not a requirement, but since the device i mentioned has 2 radios i thought since i already paid the price i would utilize both.
I took a look at these antennas. Maybe I misunderstand something, but the 2x2 MIMO option, which i assume i require has a gain of 14dBi. Doesn’t that mean that it irradiates a bigger surface overall than the ax15s which is 15dBi, just in a different pattern?
They are 30/30 degree, both azimuth and elevation, while the ax15s is 120° azimuth and really narrow on elevation.
The “other” side is a building facade, but there is an attic behind the wall. I already have STP cabling installed on both sides that i would like to utilize instead of running new RF cables.
I feel like you’d get 10% more throughput on 5 GHz. From my own testing 802.11ax gives a bit better throughput than 802.11ac in PtP given everything else stays the same.
It certainly is possible to use both 5 GHz and 2.4 GHz at the same time.
If money is not an issue I’d get the mANT30.
Thank you ansky for sharing your real world experience regarding 802.11ax. Based on that i decided to not replace my current setup.
Because of what igorr29 said i decided to look into the 60GHz situation again in the hopes that similar to Italy things changed here too. And the plot thickens: TLDR; it’s still required to register 60GHz outdoor ptp links but you can’t do so as a private person, only as a company.
This isn’t mandated by any kind of law, but is so because the permits based on the registrations are issued by an automated system that only handles companies but not ordinary people like my humble self. I’m not making this up. The guy responding to my questions said that system developments that will solve this are underway but he recommended not to hold my breath for their completion.
He was also kind enough to point me to the law about possible fines, which would usually be 1% of the income of the company using unpermitted radios, but since I’m not one, in my case it could be anything between 135USD and 268,766USD, based on the amount of damage my link might cause and the costs of locating my stations by the authority.
At the moment I’m thinking about asking the permission of the property owners between the two endpoints to allow me to run fiber on the top of their fence posts at the far end of their backyard, LOL (i personally know all of 'em, small town things…). Half the price, a little bit of hassle and 15x the bandwidth.
I don’t know where you are from, but maybe you are not familiar with the bureaucracy often involved with paying even trifling amounts of money to the government/local authorities, etc. in many countries for fees, licenses and similar.
