wifi

Binned UniFi!

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More like sold them all but I’m no longer running the UAP-AC-Pro’s. As far as performance went, they worked fine, I had 3 in total, 1 in the loft space for the main house, 1 in the mancave and 1 out at the MIL’s who is on a UBNT wireless bridge for some free and easy coverage. I can’t really fault the UAP’s, the coverage was good and speeds were always plenty for what I needed.

Why Then?
I’ve fairly recently extended my house and needed to add another AP. For my work I use the very versatile Zyxel Nebula range and it just made sense to “hop” brand and move over. The Zyxel kit comapritively is slightly cheaper and I made the step over onto ax hardware being as I’ve gone Gig at home now as well.

Step in the Zyxel NWA50AX – The main reasons for using this AP are, primarily I work with this kit every day so why wouldn’t you? It’s WiFi6 capable so as devices are swapped out I can eek more performance out of the WiFi, they don’t require me to maintain a controller, Zyxel do all of this for you, the cost point on these is brilliant. I picked up 4 AP’s at a cost of £69 each and overall I have more coverage of the house and far better throughputs and finally the performance, my thorughput is noticabely higher now than it was running the old setup. This is likely in part due to now having 2 AP’s serviing the house rather than 1 but overall I’m very happy!

You can read a bit more about them here
https://www.zyxel.com/uk/en-gb/products/wireless/802-11ax-wifi-6-dual-radio-poe-access-point-nwa50ax

After a small break away…

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I’m semi back. Not fully into the swing of things as I don’t thing the online gaming will ever reignite but the networky bit may evolve slightly into less Mikrotik, more variety and possibly some connectivity stuff as well.

Anyway… First update for a while, notable things to mention, PC has been upgraded to 12th Gen i7, laptop has changed now to an M1 Air and I’m moved away from the Ubiquiti wireless onto Zyxel Nebula.

Now that’s out of the way, living in the small out of city town I do, FTTP is due to be installed in 2 weeks. Fingers crossed it goes well (Openreach can go without issues sometimes).

UK 5Ghz Wifi March 2018

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I’ve been keeping an eye on the latest updates from OFCOM and not too long ago there was a release of a notch in the 5.8Ghz channel banding which has ultimately led to creating/allowing use of some more channel space at the higher end. With a slight shuffle around of existing conventions it now means that you can effectively run 6 20Mhz links in Band C.

Below is an image (and PDF) of my proposal of how to do this along with a chart of other 5Ghz wifi usage and availability. I am by no means saying that this is the “right” or “only” way of doing this but to my logic this makes the best use of the newly available spectrum.

 

 

You can download a nice PDF version of the above chart from here.

MikroTik WAP60G Wireless Wire – The Best You’ll Never Use!

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wirelesswire

OK so maybe I was a little harsh in the title, but to be honest. It’s quite true for the UK right now.

MikroTiks wireless wire truly is a groundbreaking product, Gigabit full duplex link over wireless at a total retail cost of less than £200 but if something sounds to good to be true, it usually is. The form factor of these units following the WAP build is great, small, versatile and outdoor grade, they feel so well made with a good weight to them. The box comes presented well and they have a nearly premium feel when you are opening the package (something which normally eludes even the expensive MikroTik products). Out of the box they follow MikroTiks normal IP convention of being on 192.168.88.0/24 space and are addressed and fully secured from the off, you can literally connect them and start passing traffic over them. So I did.

Performance was just as good as expected, with the units in very close proximity (probably a little too close) they were quite capable of maintaining a +800Mb speed test although that was using the built in bandwidth tester which is quite notorious for not being as efficient as it could be. Single duplex tests were slightly better as expected and when the connection was limited to “only” 500Mb either direction latency was measured at <1ms. At full tilt the latency did get a little wobbly but again I’m more along the lines of thinking this was the CPU’s in the devices that the actual link limitations.

tik60g2

So why won’t we be using this?

Unfortunately for our country whilst the use of the 60Ghz frequencies mentioned is license exempt, there are stipulations you need to adhere to, this one falls over in that whilst MikroTik haven’t officially released the specs, it is speculated the antenna gain in them is around 13dB which falls short of OFCOMs guideline stating that you need to use a minimum of 30dB to legally use the 60Ghz spectrum outdoors (page 2 if you’re interested). For the time being this means that this amazing wireless wire product is indoor use only.

There is a company though in Poland who are currently developing some larger antenna for them http://siec.multimediahd.pl/

So whilst the Gigabit full duplex low latency low price link is something we certainly want to see more of, you won’t be seeing one mounted externally anywhere near you any time soon (well not legally anyway).

MikroTik website product link here