Home networking help

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20 Oct 2002
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Surrey
Hi,

I have a working wifi link between my house and a summerhouse in the garden which I use an office, however it now sounds like both me and my partner are going to be working from home longer term now due to COVID-19 so I need to connect 2 laptops up instead of 1.

Over the years, I've now gotten massively out of touch with this sort of thing, would appreciate some advice!

The external wifi AP on the shed (Ubquiti LocoM5) only has one Ethernet port on it, but I now need to connect two laptops to it, the easiest thing to do I think would be to buy a LAN hub/switch and plug that between the laptops and the external wifi AP ? However it would be good to have a wifi AP (Hotspot ?) in the summerhouse as well as wired connections - what the best way of doing this ?

Can I re-use one an old wifi broadband router for instance to act at some kind of wifi/ethernet hub ? Both of our work laptops are very heavily restricted on customizing any network settings, but will accept connecting to a standard home wired/wireless connection. Or is there another device that I should be looking for ?


Silly diagram if it helps, I think I've got the terminology right.....

 
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I would suggest a Ubiquiti UniFi AP- AC-IW or UAP-IW-HD mounted in a 30mm surface mount patten box and powered from a 48V PoE injector. Feed the link from the LocoStation into that PoE injector and you have a 2x2 AC access point with 2 RJ45 ports (AP-AC-IW) or a 4x4 Wave2 access point with 4 RJ45 ports (UAP-IW-HD).
 
Can I re-use one an old wifi broadband router for instance to act at some kind of wifi/ethernet hub
Almost any third-party wireless router can be reconfigured as an access point/network switch. Many have AP mode as a built-in option. For ISP supplied routers it'd depend on how locked down they are.
 
You might struggle with a NanoStation as a Wi-Fi client device and then having multiple MAC addresses on the far side of it - usually if you're going to do that setup it would be done as a point-to-point link and a vendor specific protocol (e.g. Ubiquiti use WDS).

This is MikroTik documentation rather than Ubiquiti but it explains the different wireless modes, you'd need an equivalent of station-pseudobridge to do what you're trying

https://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:Wireless_Station_Modes#Mode_station
 
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