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I have 2 existing buildings using about 7 year old Cisco 1300 series AP’s, just bridging across a parking lot. We will soon be getting another building about 1/3 of a mile from the existing buildings, so my thought is to go ahead and upgrade the AP’s at the existing buildings and go multipoint wireless to connect in the third building. I was planning on using Meraki for this, but they are telling me that they can only bridge across one VLAN - I have 3 that I would need to do. They say I could do it with a layer 3 switch, but that’s a lot of extra expense that shouldn’t be needed. Anyone have any other preferences for multipoint network bridging? Fiber is way too expensive for these buildings (several quotes were 15k or higher for just the two buildings across the parking lot), and I’d rather not need to pay high monthly costs for internet to the new building. I was reading up on Ubiquiti’s AirFiber but it appears to only support one PtP link.

@Cisco

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Ubiquiti has other products that should work just fine. A few nanostations might be all you need.

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Second vote for Ubiquiti.

Also, I just received an e-mail from them yesterday (or Monday): They are now shipping their 802.11ac AirMAX devices. It may take a few weeks for the supply chain to flush out (can you spell backorders?) but those would do quite nicely and will put your current hop to shame.

If timing is a concern then go for the NSM5 or similar. ($80 per station, directional antenna though.) Amazon should have them ready-to-ship.

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So there are a lot of Ubiquiti AirMax devices, how should I go about deciding what I need? Bit of a newb here, haven’t done anything with PtP since I set up those Cisco devices years back. PowerBridge, NanoBeam, NanoStation, NanoBridge…yet a lot of them seem to do the same thing?

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There is a Ubiquiti quide on how to do point to multipoint. It’s essentially just setting up one device as an AP and the other devices connect to that network. What you want to use is kind of up to you, but as I and jma89 mentioned, nanostation M5’s should do the trick so long as the have good line of sight to each other. Point to remember with the NanoStations, they have a directional antenna, so if one building is the east, and the other to the west, this will not work and you will need two separate PtP links.

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Hello, ChristopherO.

What WLAN controller are you using? You can look into Cisco 1550 access points and enable Multipoint bridging on each access point on your controller.

Let me know if you have additional concerns or need more support. Regards.

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No controller, all the Cisco AP’s I have now are in standalone mode.

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just about any device in the Ubiquiti Airmax or airfiber lines will do what you want.

They have a link calculator tool that will let you test different configs and place them on google maps to get an idea of what will work for you and what you can expect for performance

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