Hello Mikrotik folks!
I’m a prospective Mikrotik customer (never used them before) looking for some reassurance on whether my approach is going to work. I don’t have a solid understanding of network routing or how its implemented in RouterOS, so the questions I’m asking are probably very basic. I’ve tried my best to find answers in the forum, and make some sense of the complex documentation without much luck. Hopefully someone can point me in the right direction.
Background:
- New House
- Poor DSL. No prospect for FTTP
- Direct line of sight to 4G base station, offering bands 1 & 20. Strong signal on my phone.
- Thick walls, meaning 4G/LTE radio/antenna is probably better to be outside
- Would like wifi in the garden, to serve future garden office
- Would like 3 SSIDs (Home, Guest, & IOT) configured across APs with firewall rules in place between them. (Note: I recognise I’ll need to think properly about VLANs/rules for both the wired and wireless interfaces for this to work)
Current Idea:
- wAP AC LTE6 Kit mounted outside, providing Wifi to the garden and 4G (CAT6 in the hope that I can receive both bands for CA) connectivity. wAP AC LTE also simplifies wiring instead of using coax and external antennas. This is the main reason I'm keen on this solution because it does the job of two things in one.
- a Mikrotik router indoors, either with wifi or without.
- Additional indoor cAPs as necessary
- All wifi interfaces managed by CAPsMAN on the indoor router (because it seems like the right thing to do)
Questions:
Is it possible to:
- present the LTE interface back to the indoor router in a way it can then be routed to the rest of the network (why, you ask? I know the wAP AC can be the router on its own, but it doesn't seem like the right thing to do. might be over thinking it though), and;
- manage the wifi interface of the wAP AC LTE via CAPsMAN on the indoor router.
- do the above using one wired ethernet interface on the wAP AC to the indoor router (or would I need ethernet interfaces i.e. two cables instead of one)
If the above isn’t going to work or there are limitations with it, what would they be and what would the best solution be?
A note on VLANS, I'd imagine I'd need something like:
- Management (Mikrotik devices)
- Wired trusted (NAS)
- Wired IOT (Rpi homeassistant)
- Wireless Guest
- Wireless IOT (ESPHome devices, tasmota etc)
- Wireless trusted
There's probably a lot more that I could do here, though just trying to work out what the theoretical bare minimum would be.
I'm probably making what should be a simple home network far more complicated than it needs to be, but this is why I'm interested in Mikrotik and I like a challenge! If I wanted simple, I'd be looking at boring consumer gear instead! That said I may well be tempting fate and biting off more than I can chew! On that basis, this is likely to be one of many posts, so apologies in advance!
Hopefully some of you good people have some ideas and advice.
Cheers,
Nick