In my apartment I needed to get wired networking with VLANs across the apartment. I didn’t want to run a wire since I thought my roommate would not appreciate that. I wanted to have a switch near my desk, that allowed different devices I have like file server, desktop, and a few other things to have a wired link; then, connect to the modem/firewall and rest of the networking gear across the apartment.

Long story short, I ended up using a trick I didn’t know would work till I tried it. I have 2 x UAP-AC-M, they work decently well, topping out at 867Mbps and 2×2 MIMO; as well as being able to get them on sale in a 2 pack for a decent price made them a great deal. I have run 1 of them for 4 years as my main access point. Then when I wanted to get this wire connection in a new room configuration I tried to do a wireless uplink to the second one. This makes it mesh with the first access point. Now the important item I don’t seem written anywhere but works well (caveats below):

Ubiquiti access points in wireless uplink/mesh will bridge that network to the wired port on the device

This means if you have a trunk port going into your original/base mesh AP, you will have the same trunk port coming out the other end. This also means anyone who is running mesh points, and hasn’t secured the wired port may want to think about doing so. I am will skip over HOW to set this up, Ubiquiti has a good guide https://help.ui.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002262328 to walk you through it, and most APs can do wireless uplink at this point; this is more about saying it can be done, and works well from my experience to anyone thinking about implementing this or wants a solution for their home/apartment that is not powerline networking. The APs I have are 2×2 802.11AC, I’m sure with a 4×4 AP like the AC-Pro as your base you may see better performance on higher trafficked lines.

This setup has worked well for me for over 6 months now, I can easily hit the 300Mbps I get from my internet connection on a desktop plugged into this meshed AP’s port; I also get 6ms pings to servers while playing games. You get the benefit of real commercial grade antennas and radios in the APs you are using instead of a tiny wifi chip in a laptop, desktop, or device. This also lowers the number of wireless devices (since all the wired devices would have been wireless instead). I also disabled the secondary AP from hosting any of the SSIDs I have in the apartment, so it just works as a wireless uplink. My apartment is not big enough for 2 AP’s for devices.

Caveats

I am looking to move away from this setup for a few reasons. It has worked well and if you are in a pinch I would recommend this setup much more than powerline networking which I have also tried and used several times. I am hoping to move to 10gb/s networking at home with my growing homelab setup; thus, no more wireless link. The other limitation that 99% of people probably would not care about is that you can not do jumbo packets over wireless, so that means it can not be done from all I have read over a wireless link of this type.

Network Topology

The first caveat is that this configuration slightly confuses the access point when it first starts up. The first 60 seconds or so when the access point is online it will think the wired connection is its uplink and attempt to ping out over it. After that it realizes it cant hit anything and will go to wireless uplinking. Sometimes everything just works then, sometimes I have had my switch be confused about where traffic should go and had to power cycle it; in this case it was just a Netgear Prosafe switch with VLANs, not especially smart, but not the dumbest switch. This is similar to a enterprise networks re-converge time when a link is downed. Overall it is rarely a problem and these APs are solid and can go months between restarts, but this is something to lookout for.

Remember that if a Ubiquiti AP cant get an IP, then it doesn’t broadcast SSIDs; this is important since if the base AP boots (like after a power outage) and doesn’t get a DHCP address quick enough, it wont broadcast, then the mesh side will never find an uplink to connect to.

Management

With the earlier mentioned topology issues you can run into, that can make management difficult. You need to make sure the base side of the network is stable. You can get into a position where you did a bad config push or a setting is wrong on the secondary/mesh side and the only way to fix the config is bringing that AP back to the original wired network and pushing a config to it, before the secondary AP can go back into wireless uplink mode.