Point-to-Point wireless bridge

[zackburf]

I work for a school and we have multiple campus with 20+ building per campus. We are looking at purchasing a couple of Ubiquiti nano-stations with the hopes that they will be able to serve as a temp back up connection whenever we run into issues connecting to buildings.  The buildings are close together with the largest space being maybe 100-200 yards.

My question is will these work through walls? Our hope is we can just hook this up in the closet of the nearest building and point it and connect it to the building that is down's closet.  Since it is close I was wondering if the signal will be strong enough to go through 3-4 brick walls.

[deanwebb]

It's more a question of what's in the walls besides the brick. Older buildings will sometimes have a metal mesh holding in an aggregate - and that mesh will KILL wireless reception. There's also a question of interference from wiring and / or other gear such as microwaves or other sources of radio waves.

You mention 100-200 yards: you'll either need a super-strong signal to cross that gap or a series of outdoor-rated relay points. With that question to start things off, what is the radio strength of the Ubiquiti? How far does it reach before you need a repeater?

Do you have any tools for measuring wireless signal strength? There are several free tools that can run on mobile phones, and those would allow you to create a heatmap chart of where you get particular signal strengths. That, in turn, would allow you to engineer where to place the signal repeaters.

[SimonV]

You really need a clear line-of-sight for point-to-point or point-to-multipoint wireless to work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresnel_zone

Usually these bridges would be mounted in a fixed position, on a pole on the roof.

[icecream-guy]

can someone say "cantenna"?

[LynK]

Zack,

I have implemented ubiquiti P2P connections and here are my recommendations.

1) You need a CLEAR line of sight

2) The bandwidth parameters are AGGREGATE. Meaning a NBE-5AC-Gen2 has 450+ mbps. In ideal conditions we only got 400 mbps, and this is AGGREGATE. Meaning, if you want full duplex speeds, you can only get 200/200. Make sure you take this into consideration. So a 2Gbps throughput unit can do 1G/1G.

3) I would recommend putting both units on the roof of a building, and on a pole around 6-10 feet in the air. Then make sure you analyze channels to find the cleanest 5GHz channels to use.

4) Make sure you use ping watchdog, to auto reboot if link becomes unavailable.

5) Make sure you have lightning protection for units

6) Purchase the addon that allows for cleaner directional connection (called isobeam acccessory)

good luck! hope it helps