@Criggie have you tried the hikvision cameras?

No - they're thousands of dollars here

that one was 36 or something/

@Criggie they seem not very popular here.

I hope I don't need more than one. I don't have high requirements on speed. It's not a very large flat either.

I'm mostly looking into those devices since there are no low end .11ax out there.

I used to need two APs to cover my 110 square metre house, because it was lathe and plaster which tended to stop radio at 2.4 GHz. And I had a third out in the garage because why not.

11ax is a thing?

I remember when 802.11b was cool and new.

For 11ac or 11 I cannot find anything without dual-band.

I do not see any use whatsoever fort the 2.4GHz band. That means half of the receivers and antennas would be permanently idle. This irks me.

I'm in 80 m² with thick brick walls. But a second ap is no good in the same room.

If 2.4 and 5 bands would have the same SSID and devices would seem seamlessly switch. That would be use case for dual band.

yeah fair enough

2.4 GHz is still needed for older stuff, but if you're a modern person with nothing older than a couple months then that's probably OK

:-P

Can't just cut up walls to lay Ethernet cables.

@Criggie about 120 months?

-grin-

I still use a Palm TX PDA

Its 15 years old, only supports 802.11b

Does do WPA2 interestingly.

11a/b is a 1999 standard

I had only Ethernet back then.

First thing was a 2008 model think pad (I replaced the WiFi with a 11n in 2011 since the original one had one fried TX end stage for antenna plug being lose).

-grin-

Right I'm sleep Good night

@gschenk If the APs can see one another, could they use 2.4 for backhaul?

The devices I installed (according to the manual) are supposed to use the least-congested alternate frequencies for backhaul.

does 2.4 not have much lower throughput?

I have an AP labelled garage that's been in my office next to the AP labelled house for months now

must buy some cable

part of me wants to run fibre to the garage, for funzies

overkill for spotify and so I can set up google maps before I get out of my phone dead zone, but would be fun

The main problem with 2.4 GHz are crowded channels. Meshing seems quite interesting. Repeater is also interesting.

repeaters are just lazy - wires make the best backhaul and can carry power too.

fibre can't carry power, you need copper for power

It's a bit overkill though to have an actual AP at home. Rather than using what's built into DSL or cable routers. However, the one I'm using is so terribly bad that it cannot go on line this.

also remember the 2.4 GHz ISM bands are unlicenced so anyone can run transmitters, not just ethernet in that space. So a wireless camera might use 2.4 GHz but not ethernet.

Such a camera is just blasting noise out into the spectrum.

@Criggie repeater to boost a phone's AP mode. When land line is down I could go to 5G or LTE. One of our phones has an unlimited contract. It costs a lot (25€/month) but it's been worth it for home office.

As soon as the are two zoom session open there's about half an hour before WiFi fails. Takes minutes to hours until it's up again. I thought first it was there whole router/modem. However, Ethernet works.

before we got our internet connection set up, lockdowns caused plenty of delays, I used my phone over USB as the upstream connection

then the rest of the network was as it is now

works well as a failover too

the garage has power, so that's not an issue and I have a spare managed switch with some sfp sockets

I'd like to stick some other stuff down there too. a dumb terminal or cheap computer would be nice, and a humidity / temperature sensor

A pi4 8GB makes a half-decent terminal.

Not fast but useable, can run over POE too :)))