Well, back to my rural internet drama, but now with consistent options.
When my father installed fiber internet, the provider provided him with a Chinese router that is not worth mentioning, as the area of ​​the house where the router was installed is higher, he was able to cover the entire yellow area below it without any problems. ..
Chatting here on the forum, I came to the conclusion that the ideal would be to put two Comfast EW72 V2 as AP and a MikroTik to do the routing, this solution would cost around 250 Dollars, and even if I exchanged the Mikrotik for a cheaper domestic solution the difference wouldn't be that big since you'd have to buy a switch.
The advantages of this system are that the EW72 easily promises to cover a radius of 100m and basically two of them would already cover the entire farm.
The disadvantages are that I would need to compromise one of the bands on the second AP as it does not have three antennas and one of them would need to receive the signal from the first AP to be able to create the mesh network.
Basically the design I estimated considering the 100m radius is this.
Talking to some people in the area here in Brazil, they suggested that I do a cheaper option that seemed interesting to me and I would like your opinion here on the forum.
This option consists of using two Xiaomi mi 4a gigabit routers as APs and a Xiaomi AX3000T doing the routing in the house.
As the AX3000T only has 4 ports, I would use a switch to expand my needs, and basically I would do everything wired using a cat5e cable with a maximum of 70m, which in theory meets the needs of my network.
I saw in tests that in a straight line and without obstacles the Mi 4a managed to reach an incredible 250m, but I'm considering a radius of 60m so as not to escape reality, they will be protected in a case with just the antennas out, so external exposure will not be a problem.
According to the design I made, this option would work, it would be 100% Openwrt and would cost around 150 Dollars.
It would look more or less like this
My questions are:
How would the switch work in relation to OpenWRT?
I'm thinking about using a cheap 5 or 8 port DSA switch and connecting the two AP's to it, as the two AP's would use OpenWRT and be on the same network I don't think they would be any problem, on the AX3000T it has 4 ports where one would be for the switch, two would be dedicated to receiving internet from the provider and starlink and one for my PC, in my accounts there would still be some ports left over for other things.
I saw that DSA would make OpenWRT understand each switch port independently, is this real?
This way I could redirect Vlans for each port and keep the entire structure organized?
Finishing here, as a picture is worth a thousand words (we say that here in Brazil, it's a very popular phrase) I will leave you with an image of how the farm is currently, and I believe that with this image you will understand why I want to save every possible cent, if that's not enough, imagine that our purchasing power is so ridiculous that 100 Dollars for me would basically be 1000 Dollars for you, sometimes even more than that.
