Point-to-point Wi-Fi bridging between buildings—the cheap and easy way

Wi-Fi News Digest
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I know we post a lot of Ars Technica stuff on here, but it’s just so dang useful and approachable content.

For example, this author’s goal for the how-we-did-piece was "not to geek out as hard as possible by mounting and aiming everything with millimeter precision. Instead, we’re simply out to demonstrate that wirelessly connecting two buildings quickly, cheaply, and easily is possible for anyone."

As someone who is more Wi-Fi savvy than the average bear but isn’t a full-blown CWNE like some of my team (cough @Joel cough), I appreciated the approach in this piece. It’s technical enough to get me excited to nerd out, but not so complex that I’m scared away.

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Bice to hear but with a few weaknesses or flaws in my opinion:

  1. The P-t-P link is limited to a max therorical TCP speed of 100 Mb/s (see your pictures), wihich turns out a 75/80 Mb/s in real worls if you are happy. With a very cheap (almost same price) ‘real’ bridge from Unifi you’ll be at 600 Mb/s radio speed (1 Gb/s cable speed)
  2. your ‘distance’ settings is absoçlutely not about power transmission but about timing to optimize the connection - if you look on your own screensvhots Tx Power is at +24 dBm which is absolute max for this device so you ere in fact ‘polluting’ spectrum. Due to very low background noise and high SZ/N ration you could in fact lower your Tx power of some 10 dB without problem
  3. Transmission is ‘normal’ TCP, not a P-t-P improved way like AirMax or similar from other brands
  4. By using plain 5 Ghz wap2 transmission (specially at +27 dBm) tou greatly increase the range of possible interception / decypher of your communications - but I receognize this is a minor effect if you’re outside urban zone

So yes it’s a working soçlution but you could do muche better at around same price

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