Many moons ago when we first bought our place in Spain (6 days and counting) I bought something called an OM2P – a small white WIFI Access Point. I’m talking several years ago.
What I was after was private WIFI and public WIFI – something I could charge a nominal sum for. Now the reason for this is that at the time, there was very little in the way of WIFI access in the village of Galera (Granada area) and it was costing me a lot for a beamed Internet connection from a company called Iberbanda (we referred to this state owned company as “Iberbandits”).
I figured if I put the access point near the edge of the building, anyone wanting to use it could do so for a nominal sum and that would help pay for the connection.
Today we have high speed Internet over there and I put the unit in a cupboard 2 years ago. Today I dragged it out wondering whether to throw it away or find a use for it (door-stop perhaps). A quick dusting and it looks as good as new. The unit is interesting as ALL setup is done via the web. You plug it into 12v and your Ethernet – it finds it’s own way to talk to the CLOUDTRAX servers and from there you can go off to a website and control everything.
Convinced they’d have gone bust by now I plugged the unit in and went off to the website.
Not only was my OM2P recognised but I was informed that an update was due – did I wish to go ahead. I agreed and 10 minutes later not only was my OM2P fully updated but also given a whole load of new features – the update is only a couple of months old. So now this little white wonder can create up to FOUR SSIDs. I’m not interested in the public side so I switched off the main one. That left three SSIDs to play with. They can be set up to be just simple access points on the network OR totally isolated.
As it happens when we head off to Spain, our place becomes a holiday rental (www.hollyberry-cottage.co.uk) for the summer and I was struggling with the best way to isolate my various access points from visitors to the cottage. Not only can the SSIDs be made utterly isolated – they can also be bandwidth limited (that’s not working for me – I’ve reported it) and even optionally isolated from each other. If you wish you can make SSID1 accept tokens from credit cards etc and let the public have a little bit of your bandwidth (isolated).. or not.
Good investment.
Hi Peter,
I was wondering if you could help me. I came across your site searching (in vain) to configure an external wifi router (in this case an airport express– though any router would do) with Iberbanda up in the Campo. Instead of using their extremely poor wifi module. It’s currently configured with their avi pack that has a box connected to the annena>> which connects to the VOIP module >> which then plugs into their cheap wifi router. I’m hoping to bypass the final stage of this but cannot figure out the connection have looked at the manuals in Spanish for both devices but cannot get it to work with the WAN port on the airport express as it does so effortlessly with their provided wifi router. You mentioned you had Iberbanda with an external wifi router. So was just looking to see if you could help. Thanks so much for your help in advance if you have any ideas.
Hi Pete,
if you dont need all of these fancy features routerboad/mikrotik (routerOS) has implemented – honestly i dont know what performance such a device has available for the primary feature ‘AccessPoint’, when features like VPN are used – you can take a look at https://www.ubnt.com
To get VPN you can use in addition to the AP(https://www.ubnt.com/unifi/unifi-ap-ac-pro/) some mikrotik router (f.e http://routerboard.com/RB750G) or an ubnt router like https://www.ubnt.com/edgemax/edgerouter-x/
The Pro APs have native 802.3af PoE/802.3at PoE+ support and a POE injector is also included with each AP.
Unifi is a nice GUI and you can do layer 3 adoption to get them registered from nearly anywhere.
Best regards
Thanks!
Iberbanda (or as we used to call them Iberbandits)… there’s a name from the past. Don’t you have Habland out there? Afraid I can’t help as it’s a long time since we had Iberbanda. I can say that with Habland (which may be similar) their dish provides an RJ45 output and I simply use a normal (in this case Draytek) modem of my own – WAN access is set up as PPPoE. They had to have my MAC address to let it work with their panel and there’s a user name and password. That’s pretty much it. From my Draytek I have wired connection to two other modems (as we’re in a cave and WIFI does not like going through rock) all of which have WIFI channels and I spread the channels between them. All works a treat.
Hi, Pete.
Glad your are online again. And i have my five’o’clock reading.
Didn’t know about Cloudtrax before – haven’t seen such beast in our forrests.
Thanks for pointing.
I will recommend you to pay attention to mikrotik – http://routerboard.com
It’s not a real enduser device, it will get a time for understanding.
But it will give you a lot of possibilities you may need in near future.
Don’t think you will use such things as MPLS, BGP or virtual machines, but there are a lot of things it can do for you:
– really working WebUI with very good CLI
– local DNS-server with your own names
– DynDNS from the box
– unlimited SSIDs with unlimited VLANs
– WPS/WDS/Wireless trunks
– hotspot/user management software
– remote wifi monitoring/traffic sniffing/performance test
– cascading PoE
– VPN client/server with a lot of features – you can connect LANs from your sites in one
– flexible routing/firewalling
– remote wifi monitoring
– traffic graphs
– script language
– possiblity to add other mikrotiks as simple controlled APs using ne of them as controller
– provider-level QOS
– long list of models from $25 to $2k5 for every kind of use (SOHO-routers, dumb APs, wireless bridges etc) all with same interface
– good documentation and community
I don’t know another universal soldier on the market especially with such price.
May be devices with custom firmware based on OpenWRT but it ist not user-frirendly and flexible as RouterOS.
Not a very simple device but your level is much higher then you need to use it.
Most interesting devices:
http://routerboard.com/RBmAPL-2nD
http://routerboard.com/RB952Ui-5ac2nD
http://routerboard.com/RBcAP2n
I’ll be glad if you will give it a try. /i’m not a dealer :-)/
Well that’s interesting – not seen those before. The current unit is setup and will do what I need for now but I might just get one of these to see what it can do. Thanks.