Hey everyone,

I have two MikroTik wAP ax devices, and I need to connect the 1st and 3rd floors in an old apartment building with thick floors and walls. Unfortunately, there’s no direct line of sight—so I’m worried about the signal and throughput. My goal is to create a single Layer 2 network, so the 3rd floor devices are in the same subnet as those on the 1st floor.

I’m considering:

1. Station-bridge on 5 GHz as a dedicated backhaul, and using 2.4 GHz for clients.
2. WDS between both wAP ac units.
3. Possibly setting up some sort of mesh.

Also, MikroTik’s Wireless Wire (60 GHz) kit looks cool. Has anyone tried using it indoors in older buildings with thick floors?
Any real-world tips or best practices on bridging these floors would be super appreciated.

Thanks in advance

What did Scotty say to Captain Kirk?

Use a cable/fibre.

And if you, despite advice by @sid5632, decide to beam data up ... you might have more success by using reflection from neighbouring building than through two concrete floors/ceilings ... if neighbouring building has large vertical surface facing towards "your" building and is not too far away. But beware of neighbours opening their windows, that might affect your "reflective" link more than you can imagine.
Contrary to popular belief, reinforced concrete is not transparent for radio waves ...

What did Scotty say to Captain Kirk?

Use a cable/fibre.

"I don't have the power"
Unfortunately no chance to use a cable!

How about using a pair of PLC devices? MT doesn't have any contemporary offering, but there are other vendors offering it.

If there happens to be a (neglected) coaxial cable available, you could use a pair of MoCA devices (usually works way better than PLC ... again no MT offering).

How about using a pair of PLC devices? MT doesn't have any contemporary offering, but there are other vendors offering it.

If there happens to be a (neglected) coaxial cable available, you could use a pair of MoCA devices (usually works way better than PLC ... again no MT offering).

Thanks for the answer.
I actually tried PLC in the past, but only got around 1 Mbit of throughput, so it wasn’t really feasible.

So does that mean there’s basically no difference in this particular scenario between using a wAP ax or the MikroTik Wireless Wire with 60 GHz?

So does that mean there’s basically no difference in this particular scenario between using a wAP ax or the MikroTik Wireless Wire with 60 GHz?

If you're thinking about going through concrete floors/ceilings, then lower frequency is likely to fare better ... and IMO 60GHz is guaranteed to go nowhere (even thin window glass or a single sparse tree canopy can completely block connection or very severely degrade performance).

Only for the record (and it depends on country/local regulations) there are ethernet cables certified to be installed in the same conduit as mains/current ones.
And fiber is also a possibility (the real issue with fiber is too tight curves and the termination, otherwise a fiber can pass almost anywhere.

Not cheap, though.
Depending on your location an on-site fusion splice job by an electrician could cost less than or around 150$/€, the rest could be DIY, or maybe another 250-400$/€.
Two CRS305-1G-4S+IN, four SFP's, the fiber and pigtails, and a couple wall sockets could be some 700 $/€.

But you will have a 10 Gb link, that should be fast enough for years to come.

60 Ghz link will fail in medium/heavy rain, a leaf or a sheet of paper is enough to make the link fail, not so casually the Cubes have a failover 5 Ghz radio.
You could - in theory - put two of them outside the window (on a short horizontal pole) if you are allowed to do so, pointed vertically to each other, but there are known issues with water infiltration even if mounted slightly angled from horizontal, so some extra preventive care would be needed (disassembling and properly sealing them) and you will need anyway to drill a few holes.

Yeah, there are BIMMF fibers (Bend-Insensitive Multimode Fibers) designed for really tight spaces that can be bent with a radius as small as 7.5 mm to 15 mm (depending on the cable specs). BIMMF can be bought pre-terminated in different fixed lengths too.

@mmbln - If you can't find a suitable conduit between the floors, you might consider using outdoor-rated UTP cables mounted on the outer wall as an alternative. If you plan to install WiFi on all floors, one benefit of using Ethernet is that you can use a PoE-capable switch to power all the access points. This also makes them much easier to mount wherever you want, since you don't have to bother about the location of power outlets.

Bottom line: forget about wireless solutions and go for wired ones like UTP (Ethernet) or fiber.

If it is not possible to drill floors or internal walls so maybe you can consider to pass fibers along gutters down to the basement to make the connection point there? It should be safe and easy if you put them in separate thin pipes mounted to gutters.

Idea out of the box but no so fresh as once I even considered mounting on a wall special dummy external chimney pipe just for wires . It was a historical building and solution >>external chimney + one hole in a wall per level" was more acceptable by a conservator than drilling through wooden floors and ceilings on each level with an old "do not ask what it consist of" historical insulation between them.

EDIT:

Stupid me ... so simple idea if only you can use it: internal ventilation ducts.

Thanks to everyone for all the different suggestions—especially the creative ideas around installing fiber or running cable on the outside walls. I really appreciate it! I’ll check with the landlord to see if that’s feasible.

I’d like to circle back to my original question about which mode is the most reliable for using the wAP ax in a purely wireless setup. Since a basic repeater setup usually halves the available throughput (because the radio has to handle both backhaul and client traffic on the same channel), that doesn’t seem ideal.

So would the best bet be setting one wAP ax in ap-bridge mode and the other in station-bridge, or is WDS still worth considering if I’m only linking two devices? If there’s any real advantage to going mesh for this two-device scenario, I’d love to hear your thoughts on that as well.

If its an old building does it have old RG6 coax cabling joinging rooms! ( works reasonably with adapters)
You could use that as well. I imagine running outdoor RG6 may be an easy sell to as its quite common to see.

Thanks to everyone for all the different suggestions—especially the creative ideas around installing fiber or running cable on the outside walls. I really appreciate it! I’ll check with the landlord to see if that’s feasible.

I’d like to circle back to my original question about which mode is the most reliable for using the wAP ax in a purely wireless setup. Since a basic repeater setup usually halves the available throughput (because the radio has to handle both backhaul and client traffic on the same channel), that doesn’t seem ideal.

So would the best bet be setting one wAP ax in ap-bridge mode and the other in station-bridge, or is WDS still worth considering if I’m only linking two devices? If there’s any real advantage to going mesh for this two-device scenario, I’d love to hear your thoughts on that as well.

I was there but slightly better conditions: two rooms with two concrete walls between. See here: viewtopic.php?t=209752.
I managed to get stable 180 Mbit/s by moving the things around to have kind-of one wall between, tweaking channels and a lot of small other stuff.

All in all nightmare experience I spent dozens of hours to tweak it. Concrete walls kill the experience of 5Ghz, but 2.4Ghz is so crowded that close to useless.

The guys gave you gold advice. Do whatever you can and go wired.
Frankly saying I am going to test a newest software and if this does not help I switch from 2 x cAP AC to 2 x wAP ax which would in my condition give me stable 300Mbit/s (I hope).

Good luck.

Only as a side note, anav's suggestion (if you really can use some existing coaxial cables) is for MOCA adapters (search for MOCA 2.5), there is a new, faster 3.0 standard, but seemingly not (yet) consumer level devices available, avoid MOCA 2.0 devices:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedi ... x_Alliance
If the coax cable is used by (say) TV or satellite antenna signals it is usually needed a POE (in this case it means Point Of Entry) MOCA filter and it is possible that coaxial splitters will need to be changed with surely MOCA compatible ones.