The Ubiquiti NanoStation loco 5M is good hardware. It’s speciality gear for setting up long distance wireless network links. All of Ubiquiti’s networking gear is worth knowing about if you’re a prosumer-type networking person. I will probably buy their wifi access points next time I need one.

I’m using two NanoStations as a wireless ethernet bridge. My Internet up in Grass Valley terminates 200’ from my house. I couldn’t run a cable but a hacky wireless thing I set up was sort of working. So I asked on Metafilter on how to do a wireless solution right and got a clear consensus on using Ubiquiti equipment. $150 later and it works great! Kind of overkill; the firmware can do a lot more than just bridging and the radios are good for 5+ miles. But it’s reliable and good.

The key thing about Ubiquiti gear is the high quality radios and antennas. It just seems much more reliable than most consumer WiFi gear. Their airOS firmware is good too, it’s a bit complicated to set up but very capable and flexible. And in addition to normal 802.11n or 802.11ac they also have an optional proprietary TDMA protocol called airMax that’s designed for serving several long haul links from a single basestation. They’re mostly marketing to business customers but the equipment is sold retail and well documented for ordinary nerds to figure out.

I still wish I just had a simple wire but I’ve now made my peace with wireless networking. It works well with good gear in a noncongested environment. I wrote up some technical notes on modern wifi so I understood the details better. Starting with 802.11n and MIMO there was a significant improvement in wireless networking protocols, it’s really pretty amazing technology.