Hacker News Reader

Comment by Johnny555 | Hacker News Reader

Depends how much bandwidth you need and what the distance is. A pair of Unifi Nanostations (available in 2.4Ghz, 5Ghz, 900Mhz models), will give you 100Mbit, a pair of Nanobeams will give you up to 450Mbit.

I use a single Nanostation 5Ghz out on the front porch to bridge back to my Unifi Wifi node

View on HN

I need as much bandwidth as I can get over a pretty short distance -- let's say 30 feet. I'm bridging two closets at opposite ends of a hallway. One closet has the WAN connection. The other closet has a bunch of hard wire gear (NAS, home theater, etc).

You could use a pair of airfiber stations to get over 1 Gbit/sec. But they are not cheap. You'd probably be better off finding a way to run fiber (or even cat5) to get 10 gigabit.

Well my current solution works fine. I have an AC87 in each closet. The one with the gear runs in "wireless bridge" mode. I'm attracted to the prosumer Unifi stuff but there doesn't seem to be a simple solution to bridging. The airFiber units in our hallway is a little too much. And there's no easy way to run cat5.

Its hard to get simpler or cheaper than a pair of $60 Nanobeams that will give you 400+ mbit of performance and the integrated 16dBi antennas will help reduce interference from other devices. Ubiquiti also has a Litebeam with a 23dBi antenna that's even cheaper - $49... I don't have any experience with those, but I assume they would work just as well (but proper aiming would be a little more critical with the higher gain antenna)

If your existing routers live in the closets, the Nanobeams can too, you just need to aim them at each other.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com