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terrificsaxaphone
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4G/LTE Home Network - Journey Into The Unknown

Fri Aug 13, 2021 11:28 pm

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
 
ConnyMercier
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Re: 4G/LTE Home Network - Journey Into The Unknown

Tue Aug 17, 2021 1:11 pm

Good Morning,

I don't think you will have any limitation with Mikrotik-Devices for your relatively Easy Network-Demands.

Anwser to Question 1 :
It is Possible to Passthough a LTE-Connection to a Non-LTE Router
-->> See Manual : https://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:I ... gh_Example

Anwser to Question 2 :
Als Long as there ist a Network connection between your "Main" Router and the LTE-Router ,
you will be able to use Capsmann to Manage the Wireless-Interfaces

Anwser to Question 3:
You will only need 1 Cable.
You could use 2 for more bandwith ( 1 for LTE and 1 for WLAN)


Bonus :
My Hardware recommendation would be for the MAIN-Router a HEX s or better.
A Switch with PoE (CRS112-8P-4S-IN or CRS328-24P-4S+RM) to easily power all your Network-Devices centrelly.
 
terrificsaxaphone
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Re: 4G/LTE Home Network - Journey Into The Unknown

Thu Aug 19, 2021 12:21 am

Hi ConnyMercier,

Thanks very much for your help. That's really useful.

Would you be able to give me an idea of how the routing/vlans might work for this combination of wAP ac LTE and HEX s?
 
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anav
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Re: 4G/LTE Home Network - Journey Into The Unknown

Thu Aug 19, 2021 4:08 pm

Without a diagram of the layout of the house its too difficult to say.
What is the relationship of the position for LOS to the 4G tower and the rest of the house and garden.
What is the quality of LOS you have? How much clearance up/down/left/right of that LOS and how far?
 
terrificsaxaphone
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Re: 4G/LTE Home Network - Journey Into The Unknown

Sat Aug 21, 2021 12:14 pm

Hi anav,

I'm intending to install the wAP ac LTE onto a post on our 1st floor balcony. There is an unobstructed view of the 4G tower from this position, and according to a map it's ~630m away. There is also another tower approximately the same distance away, but in the other direction and in a built up area. I've not done extensive testing on the 4G side from my phone, but given it's pretty close and unobstructed, I think the wAP ac LTE would be sufficient on its own. I could experiment with an external high gain antenna to get the maximum signal possible, but that might be overkill given the proximity. The product is also fitting because of its dual functionality as an AP and an LTE gateway, which suits my needs to also serve wifi in the garden to a future outside office that I plan to build. The SXT LTE model could be an alternative, but I would prefer to combine the AP/LTE functionality into once device if I can. I also don't think I need the additional gain of the SXT LTE antenna because of the close proximity, though I could be wrong.

What I'm most interested to know is how the routing/configuration would look. Clearly, I'm setting myself up for a challenge, but I'd like to remove as much trial and error as I can beforehand, so help from this forum is invaluable.

I just don't understand enough about routing, bridging, and vlans to know what I'd need to do to route the LTE interface back to the main router, whilst also segregating the wifi interface (and multiple SSIDs) that I described in the head post. If you have any tips, I'd really appreciate it.

Cheers,

Nick
 
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anav
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Re: 4G/LTE Home Network - Journey Into The Unknown

Sat Aug 21, 2021 5:31 pm

Hi Nick,
The issue I see is that If you position the Antenna for the Tower, how does that compromise the position of the antenna for the wifi ???
Probably not at all as the 4G antennas are omni doh!!

Also you state wap LTE ac, but dont you need wap 4G ac??
Looking at the units, the one that I would consider is the WAP _ac_LTE6 !!! if stuck on the idea of one unit!

Once you have the signal into ethernet, then you can do what you like in terms of control and settings.
The WAPAC I would probably use simply as the modem/wifi and ethernet to a router in the house which deals with
all the DHCP, vlans and whatever else is required.
 
StoianK
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Re: 4G/LTE Home Network - Journey Into The Unknown

Sat Aug 21, 2021 6:51 pm

Hi Nick!
I'm using the same setup
- One wap ac lte6 outside with passthrough lte via vlan over ether1 to main router, capsman over ether2.
- main home router rb4011
- 3 cAP ac indoor as caps to main router

Now I'm thinking about second wap ac lte, with sim card from another mobile provider for backup wan.

Cheers,
Stoian
 
kasparsd
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Re: 4G/LTE Home Network - Journey Into The Unknown

Sun Aug 22, 2021 12:22 pm

Here is a description of my setup which sounds really similar to what you’re after. viewtopic.php?t=171101
 
terrificsaxaphone
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Re: 4G/LTE Home Network - Journey Into The Unknown

Sun Aug 22, 2021 10:38 pm

@anav

I should have said - the balcony overlooks the garden, which has a view of the tower in the distance. So, both the wifi and 4G are covered.

Sorry for the confusion - when I've been mentioning the wAP ac LTE, I am talking about this - https://mikrotik.com/product/wap_ac_lte6_kit. On the comment about LTE vs. 4G - to my knowledge, it appears the two terms sort of mean the same thing (there's probably way more to it than that!). The main area of interest for me is the support for bands 1 & 20 for CAT6, which are the two bands Vodafone offer on the tower near me, according to CellMapper. Cellmapper also advertises EE offering bands 1, 3, & 20, however I think the additional band is more there to cover a specific area and I have no guarantee that I'll be able to receive that band where I live, so I may not get the benefit of more throughput if I went with EE over Vodafone. I think it'll come down to what the sim contract will cost as to which I choose in the long run. I think the dual band carrier aggregation is going to be the best I can get until/if we get 5G coverage in the area.

@StoianK

That's really good to know. Interesting that you're using both ethernet interfaces on the wAP. I guess you get a bit more throughput that way. I'll bear that in mind and pull a couple of data cables when I do the install. I'll check that router out, and I like the idea of an additional fail-over wAP ac LTE.

@kasparsd

Thank you for sharing your post! That looks pretty much identical to what I'm planning to do! Great network drawing and well done working it out!

Interesting that you managed to stick to the single ethernet interface on the wAP. As I said above, I'll probably pull a couple of data cables just in case. Once I have a working configuration, I'll probably play around more with VLANs and see what I can get to work. Main thing is to start with a config that works, then I can always mess around and fall back to that if I mess it up!

Thanks all for your replies - really helpful!

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