My brother is in an apartment building that has wifi included. It’s Unifi APs in the hallways (a few years old).
It was working relatively okay for a while, but the past few weeks the performance is poor on some devices - particularly noticed on Ooma (VOIP) and FireTV Cube, which are beside each other. FireTV is saying the connection is poor (or sometimes no internet at all), and if I put higher it seems to be a bit better but not great.
I tried testing with my phone in the room, and isn’t terrible (often around 25/10 Mbps and 30ms). Almost full bars and RSSI on my phone between like -53 and -60. I’m not an expert but that doesn’t seem too bad for signal strength, so maybe signal quality issues (like interference)? There is a lot of 2.4 GHz going on in the building.
I think we want to try a media bridge, possibly placing the bridge 10 feet or so away on a shelf or wall, and either run one cable back to a switch for about 5 devices, or if the bridge has enough ports I suppose could run a bundle of cables directly.
For example I’m looking at the hAP ax2. It’s getting a bit on the costlier side (but if it works…), but my understanding is I can set up the 2.4 GHz radio as a client to the apartment wifi, and then have the 5 ports as LAN, also along with the 5GHz radio for his own wifi.
Or maybe could be one of lite models are pretty inexpensive for the bridge, then run to a switch/router. Or I know models like the ASUS RT-AX57 router have bridge mode - how would the performance compare?
I don’t know if it’s worth looking into anything special like detached/directional antennas since signal strength doesn’t seem bad and isn’t there a point where it can be TOO powerful?
If the “source” is “slow” it is not like having an AX device will make it faster, from what you write, an AC Lite TC seems like a good bet: https://mikrotik.com/product/RB952Ui-5ac2nD-TC
There’s a lot of truth to that. The apartment wifi I believe is only 2.4 GHz n (wifi 4), at least that’s all I connect as. Which makes the AX part only beneficial for the personal LAN… but then if the internet behind it is limited, probably not effective.
I guess the main part here is best signal quality from the signal there is to work with, and if this AX model (or others) would have better wireless signal even if not using the AX features. If I recall (a lot of numbers going through my head lately lol), this did have better transmit and receive sensitivity numbers than the lites. But the lites my be a better match for all that’s needed (cost considered).
Just slapping a cAP lite on the wall and running a single cable back for data and power (to a switch/router), would be kind of nice…
but its antenna gain for example is 1.5 dBi, versus even an hAP ax lite is 4.3 dBi
I’m not sure how much of a factor that is… but we are doing this for better signal.
That and the cAP lite is being sold for $80 on amazon.ca - the costs don’t necessarily scale to the MSRP. And it would still mean at least a switch.
Unlike what one could imagine from intuition a higher antenna gain is not necessarily correlated with “better” or “faster” connection.
If norms are followed, there is a limit in the output power of the device (tramission), It depends on the device, but if the limit on a given channel is (say) 23 dBm, a Mikrotik device will subtract from It the antenna gain (let’s say 3 dBm) and the radio will output max 20 dBm, if the antenna gain is 6 dBm the radio will output 17 dBm, in order to respect the limit.
Things are different for reception, where a higher gain antenna may actually provide a better sensitivity BUT while It will be able to receive lower signals, It will also receive more noise/interferences, which might slow the actual data transfer rate.
To this you add that all these (indoor) devices antennas are omnidirectional, the shape of their emissione Is roughly that of a doughnut, this doughnut is “chubby” (smaller in diameter, but thicker) for low gain antennas and “skinny” (larger in diameter, but thinner) for high gain antennas.
Check this thread: http://forum.mikrotik.com/t/does-size-of-antenna-matter/177500/1
The TLDR; is that radios and antennas are not simple to deal with.