mikrotik) Is anyone running/testing any mikrotik gear such as the rb911 or rb912, rb922, rb433, etc w/ openwrt and batman-adv?
I'm considering a multi-radio mesh node and I think this platform might be priced well enough. I do fixed wireless broadband but am looking at reaching into some heavily wooded areas that nothing else can penetrate.
The rb922 in particular has an 5Ghz 'ac radio and mini-pcie that can take a second 5Ghz 'ac radio. That makes for a really great dual 802.11'ac radio w/ gigabit port and PoE ethernet to run a cable into the customer's house. An RB433 can take 2 'ac radios and a 900Mhz radio which you could artificially increase the cost on for a lower throughput tree-penetrating backup link to be placed every x number of hops.
The rb922 version would be a sub $200 high performance mesh node.
alix) now, the alix apu1c is a 2 mini-pcie box with dual 1Ghz x86 CPUs ready to run debian and has 3 gigabit ethernet ports. This would be a nice 'edge' node with 1 or 2 of those gigabit ports dedicated to backhaul radios.
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So, the concept is that clients wouldn't actually be on wireless and batman-adv would just be handling distribution. Clients would be wired up ethernet to a PoE injector. This dual radio mesh should only add latency at each hop as a result, though the obvious link quality and capacity are taken into account. I can bring in 20-200Mbps of service but can't penetrate the trees for more than a few houses on the edge. I could do two links to reachable homes and have any number (throughput limited) of clients connect w/ the redundant path.
Thoughts?