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Comment by sathackr | Hacker News Reader

Mikrotik has a great feature set and is mostly stable for the mainstream features. Where they really fall apart is wifi throughput. Most devices won't top 400mb/s.

There is some hope on the horizon with v7 and the newest devices like Audience. Have seen reports of 1.3gb/s on these. But it's barely even beta right now.

Ruckus is pretty solid and you can usually find them used for great prices. Many units have a stand alone firmware available that negates the need for a controller.

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We used to operate a satellite office whose primary internet service was Mikrotik directional AP’s bridged at both ends and this was maybe a half mile line of sight uplink.

My testing even on gigabit chipsets mirrors your 400 mbit per AP comment, at least in my situation.

Thank you. Do Ruckus support wireless downlinks? I can't lay cables here, so the switch in my home office needs to be fed by an access point.

With unleashed they do. Its otherwise known as meshing pretty much anywhere else.

https://docs.ruckuswireless.com/unleashed/200.1.9.12/c-MeshO...

If you are talking long distances you need to start looking at directional antennas...But to say..span an A-Frame house...they would do fine as others as well.

It's just over two rooms and a hallway essentially, so should be fine. Thanks a lot!

EDIT: The "Wireless Bridge Topology" is exactly what I need, here, but it's not entirely clear to me yet if I'd really need two APs on the gateway side as the picture suggests: https://docs.ruckuswireless.com/unleashed/200.1.9.12/c-Suppo...

You will need to have one AP wired (thats the root AP) and the next ones can be wireless connected/meshed.

Note: regardless of the vendor Meshing will basically 1/2 your available wireless bandwidth. Its handy to extend coverage, and you will still be able to stream netflix and probably even things like facetime etc, but you are going to be essentially inducing a half-duplex connection into your "backbone".

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