TP-Link TL-WA7210N High Power Outdoor Wireless N150 Access Point, 2.4GHz 150Mbps, WISP/AP Router/AP, 12dBi antenna, Passive POE (WA7210N)

First our situation. We live in a rural area. We only have one internet service provider that is in our area. They only offer a 2Mb download speed, on a wireless modem. We are lucky if we can get 1Mb or more out of it. I own a business about 2.5 miles away. There we have cable modem with around 60Mb down load speed.I read a little about the using an antenna to do point to point wireless connection. So, after getting very frustrated with our home internet, I purchased two TP-LINK TL-ANT2424B antennas, two TP-LINK TL-WA7210N AP units, a few cables, and bits and bobs for mounting the antennas and grounding them.I was lucky in that I have a close line of site from my work top my house. I have a few power line and some trees a bit in the way. I cannot see the antenna from one place to the other with a monocular, but I can see the building.I installed the antenna and AP unit at the work building. Pointing to the house. I Set the AP unit to a static IP and entered the AP name and MAC address for the unit I was going to install at my house. The quick setup for the TL-WA7210N was very easy to use. I then set the unit of at my house. Again making sure it was pointing the best I could to the work building antenna, at least in the right direction. I entered the AP name and MAC address of the AP unit at work. I was very surprised and it connected right away.After a few tests I had great signal and great speed. I made a few adjustments to settings on the AP unit. I do not have the full 60Mb down load speeds, but it ranges greater then 35Mb up to over 50Mb. So, I am very happy.TP-LINK TL-WA7210N High Power Outdoor Wireless N150 Access Point, 2.4GHz 150Mbps, WISP/AP Router/AP, 12dBi antenna, Passive POETP-LINK TL-ANT2424B 2.4GHz 24dBi Directional Grid Parabolic Antenna, N Female connector, weather resistant

These units can broadcast a fairly hot signal. I setup two for a customer who needed to span an orchard to a second residence. Their service is 30/5, and on the primary unit I see speed tests a bit over both upstream and downstream links, so in other words we are getting pretty decent service from our ISP and the WAP has no trouble with those lower-end broadband speeds.The primary is set as a WAP letting the router in the office of side A handle the routing, and I mounted it on a mast to avoid most of the foliage of the orchard to the client.The client is mounted inside the home, on the wall opposite of the incoming/outgoing signal and set as AP router with a unique SSID. This nets the home speeds over 20Mbps down, and keeps the upstream working at over 5Mbps.Being directional antennas, they still transmit a fairly large bubble of coverage around them and for a decent ways behind them, thus I didn't need to setup anything fancy for the client AP router configuration. Just two of these units, powered by their proprietary POE adaptors, and some cat5e made to length.Administering them is a little more work than setting up your standard linksys/cisco/d-link home product as they require a static IP address of a hard-wired computer. The instructions fail to mention this and you can try punching in the AP's default IP of 192.168.0.254 all day long and it will ignore your requests until you set your computer's IP address to 192.168.0.1 (I'm guessing that the firmware is not smart enough to enable DHCP while being adminned).Once in the admin panel things look a bit more familiar and configuration options are fairly robust.So far after several months we're seeing 100% uptime on these units.Recommended for any long shot that you've got to setup that doesn't require modern speeds. The output is high, the design of the antennas is simple, has a small footprint, can be pole-mounted using the large zipties or stainless hose clamps (not included), and they seem to work great once you work through the setup process.Important note: As mentioned in other reviews, the integrity of the signal is adversely affected by any obstacles, even a glass paned window and a few leaves.

Worked for the first day and showed good signal. The signal quickly declined and the AP needed to be power cycled multiple times per day to restore functionality. The AP was hardwired into the main network so it shouldn't have had network communication issues.

Very nice, fully-featured box for a long-distance point-to-point link, but the built-in directional antenna that helps make that work is very detrimental to its use as an access point intended to serve a number of nearby computers. Naturally the marketing people said "don't mention that in the user manual!" and the engineers didn't insist, so there's no warning about how that directionality might degrade nearby coverage. A coverage graph might have helped tech-savvy customers, but even the nominal beam width isn't mentioned in the long and otherwise detailed user manual. A spec document mentioned by an Amazon customer gives it as 60 degrees horizontal, 30 degrees vertical. A user-supplied omnidirectional antenna attached to the external connection (and enabled in software) may solve the problem, but they really should have provided that heads-up in the AP sections of the manual.