I currently use an RB2011 at home and it is getting rather old (7 years) and tired too as it has to sit outside being cooked by the Australian sun. I thought I would look at hardware upgrade options and wanted to some advice.

I use the RB2011 to provide a home wifi by connecting it wirelessly to my Telstra account via the Air-connect service ( there is a telephone box in the street about 15 mtrs away in direct line of sight ) This works very well and provides good speeds when no one is parked in front of it.

I have set it all up with the wlan1 connecting wirelessly to the Telstra box, and then wlan2 as a virtual-slave to provision all my home devices on the local wifi.

One issue I noticed recently is that the signal has dropped off a lot in the last few months, and I expect it is noise more than Telstra traffic, as there are a lot of new developments popping up in my area and more wifi's showing up as available to join.

My first question : what is the recommended big brother upgrade of the RB2011 that would suit the purpose outlined above (we have 5 mobiles and 5 laptops maximum at a time running through the network)?

And then secondly: what options do I have to boost the wifi signal between my RB2011 and the Telstra telephone box outside?

I am especially interested in this second aspect, as someone recently posted somewhere that they can hit a Telstra box with their router from 1 kilometre, and I would love to know what equipment could do that.

Use a directional (Important) outdoor AP (SXT 5 something something (if they support 5GHz).) to get internet from outdoor service . Place this high on your house so you have a clear line of sight.
Cable from this to an indoor AP with separate WLAN for your client machines.
This will make a heap of difference, as your WLAN card won't have to both receive from outdoor and send to clients on the same time.
Also - 5GHz (if your supplier supports this) will probably fix your noise.

Get a wifi scanner app for your android and check what's available before you buy something.

Use a directional (Important) outdoor AP (SXT 5 something something (if they support 5GHz).) to get internet from outdoor service . Place this high on your house so you have a clear line of sight.
Cable from this to an indoor AP with separate WLAN for your client machines. This will make a heap of difference, as your WLAN card won't have to both receive from outdoor and send to clients on the same time. Also - 5GHz (if your supplier supports this) will probably fix your noise.

Thanks for the tips. good idea splitting off the wifi to seperate AP. I am not sure if Telsra do 5Ghz from their air-connect hotspots I tried an app but the information is vague whether it works for the public or just their management access, I will have to find out by other means.

But I just found this browsing through Mikrotik product listings, hopefully it will do the trick and covers both 2.4 and 5ghz and should also provide a seperate AP. LHG XL 52 ac - https://mikrotik.com/product/lhg_xl_52_ac