station v station-bridge mode

RouterOS General
1

Hi,

We have a private network of about 120 Mikrotik devices. Mainly separate locations connected by wifi (point to point or point to sector) They all use v6 of routerOs and the client sides are set up in station-bridge mode. Apart from some dodgy links with poor line of sight everything works well.

We just bought a mANTBox ax 15s to replace one of the sector radios (to change to 5ghz). I was surprised to see that it didn’t support NV2 mode. This is dissapointing as some of our long or difficult wifi links require it.

I can’t select “AP Bridge” as a mode on the mANTBox. It only has “AP” mode and when our existing clients try to connect using station-bridge mode, they are refused.

If we lose bridge mode for the wifi link and use AP and Station modes, what am I missing out on?

regards
Justin.

2

New wifi drivers for AX (and select AC) have a few differences compared to legacy wireless drivers:

  • AP-bridge mode is merged into AP mode
  • they only support protocol=802.11 … no more support for (proprietary) nstreme or nv2
  • station-bridge mode in wifi is not compatible with station-bridge in wireless. To build transparent wireless bridge one has to use devices running same generation of driver on both ends (it can be wifi-qcom on one end and wifi-qcom-ac on other end)

The first bullet is more or less an esthetic change (can bite unsuspecting admin though). Other two are more painful but MT doesn’t seem to be able (or want to) to change it. So it seems we’ll have to live with it.

There’s a nice article about different station modes here: https://help.mikrotik.com/docs/spaces/ROS/pages/122388518/Wireless+Station+Modes

It apllies to new wifi drivers as well (OK, no nsteme and nv2 on wifi) … with a gotcha that wifi AP to wireless client (or the other way around) is as if they are from different vendors.

3

HI,

Thanks for the quick response.

It is possible to install the old drivers on this device? I notice the packages zip file there is the wifi-qcom and a wireless package. Is wireless the old driver package?

regards

Justin.

4

Yes, the old package is wireless and it can be installed but I don’t know how well or if it works at all in conjunction with the new one. Best case you’ll have to uninstall the new one and use the old one

5

No. Legacy wireless package lacks support for AX hardware.

Actually it is possible to install that package but it would only provide support for running legacy CAPsMAN without support for local radio(s).

6

Maybe it was good back in the 802.11n days but i’ve not had a single instance where NV2 was actually better than just using 802.11… and thats with the old and absolutely terrible wireless drivers
If you can, migrate to the new wifiwave2 drivers and you’ll be absolutely amazed. It takes MikroTik wireless from abysmally slow/short ranged/unreliable to somewhat decent

7

Hi,

Are the wifiwave2 available for most devices? We have LHG 2, LHG5 and Sxt radios for clients.

Justin.

8

Wifiwave 2 drivers only available for (some?) arm based CPU devices.

There were some discussions and workarounds before wifiwave2 had station-bridge as an option.

eg.
http://forum.mikrotik.com/t/using-wifiwave2-to-bridge-two-audience-wirelessly-thoughts-4-address-mode/153357/1

9

No one knows what you’re losing without knowing your network layout.
All we can say for sure is that you are losing a single L2 broadcast domain. But for radio networks it is not recommended to use it anyway. Radio networks should work only on L3 then the network performance is higher.

10

wifi(wave2) drivers are available for all AX (and newer) devices. They are also available for ARM-based AC devices, but LHG2, LHG5 or SXT Lite5 are neither.