Any experience with AyrStone / AyrMesh?

We are trying to figure out how to get reliable internet across our farmstead, or at least the 6-10 acre center. My husband is good with getting a mesh and running ethernet cables all over underground (across arroyos etc). I want to find a wireless solution; he is worried it will be less efficient than ethernet and the speeds will be degraded. (In fairness to him, in the short term we are mainly talking about connecting a few outbuildings within 300' of our house, not the whole 10 acres).

I ran across.this which sounds perfect for our situation:
https://ayrstone.com/www/how-it-works/
Of course, the company's marketing info is going to sound fantastic...

Do any of you Permies have experience with these systems?

Kimi Iszikala wrote:We are trying to figure out how to get reliable internet across our farmstead, or at least the 6-10 acre center.

P.s. we have Starlink and the Starlink-ethernet connection cable.

We have someone living in a caravan at the far corner of our property. When I wanted to extend our wifi network to give him better bandwidth, I originally set up a TP-Link access point on a pole mounted to the end of the garage and beaming across the paddock. This worked pretty well and he could get 15-20 Mb/s on good days. Then he moved the caravan to a different location relative to his shipping container and ended up blocked by trees. Bandwidth took a nosedive and the best we saw was 1.5 Mb/s. So I got a couple of Ubiquiti NanoStation devices, put one on the container (back to line of sight) and set them to bridge mode. The remote one then talks over a short ethernet patch cable to the TP-Link, which covers the entire remote "compound." They run off a little 60W solar panel and battery and we now see 30 Mb/s pretty much all the time.

So I would definitely recommend the Ubiquiti kit. Not terribly expensive (probably $200 US for two units) and if you use their bridging protocol it's dead easy to set up. And you can't bugger it up with a backhoe.

Phil Stevens wrote:
So I would definitely recommend the Ubiquiti kit. Not terribly expensive (probably $200 US for two units) and if you use their bridging protocol it's dead easy to set up. And you can't bugger it up with a backhoe.

Thank you! This sounds perfect for our scope and application.

When I did my quick Google search on my phone for AyrMesh, I somehow misunderstood the pricing -- my husband pointed out the expense.

Ubiquity kit sounds much more affordable,  and scaled well for our needs.

May '24

Ordered and installed Ayrmesh on roof top for 4 cameras, all line of site within 100-150'. Our installer spent a day and a half on phone with them and could not get it to work. Ayrstone agreed to the return but insisted on our paying return shipping which is preposterous for a product that didn't function. We said we'd package it up, dispute the cc charge and they could arrange pick up. Ayrstone said they'd report it stolen if we did (that's a first) so we said we'd leave at the police station for pick up. We did return at our expense to get the matter closed...but still disputed the cc charge.

Hi c webb and welcome to Permies. That's a good cautionary tale you've given us...I hope your experience at least prevents others from having similar issues.

Many folks who use outdoor WiFi access points don't understand that they're not routers, so anything connected to them "looks" to the router like it's connected directly to the router with an Ethernet cable. The result is that network problems like IP address conflicts (two devices with the same IP address) and, sometimes, network loops (a device connected to the network via two interfaces) occur, causing the router to crash. Since it happens with the WiFi access point is added to the system, it's easy to blame the AP, when it's usually the case that someone has chosen to configure cameras with static IP addresses inside the router's DHCP pool, causing the IP address conflict.

Some outdoor WiFi APs can be configured to act as routers, which can introduce different problems and is not generally advised.

The newer "app-enabled" WiFi cameras do not have to have a constant IP address to work, but may not be usable if your Internet connection goes down. If you have a "traditional" IP camera that needs a constant IP address, using DHCP reservations in the router is generally better than using Static IP addresses. However, on Starlink routers, neither is advisable, since they do not allow DHCP reservations OR alteration of the DHCP pool - pass-through mode and an external router is a good idea if you're going to try to do more than use it as a WiFi "hotspot."

A basic understanding of IP networks and network addressing can be very useful, and there are some excellent explanations and "how-to" articles on the web.