How far can a point-to-point wireless bridge reach?

The ratings on this brief's shortlist vary widely. On Ubiquiti's spec sheets the UniFi Building Bridge covers 500 m (1,640 ft), the Wave Pico 1.5 km, the Wave Nano 5+ km and the airFiber 60 LR 12+ km. MikroTik lists its discontinued Wireless Wire Cube kit at 800 m. 5 GHz radios trade speed for distance and can go further, but in this brief's evidence a NanoBeam-class 5 GHz link delivers roughly 225 Mbps of real throughput, against a gigabit-class link at 60 GHz.

Real links in the evidence are much shorter than the ratings. One owner runs two Wave Picos between a house and a barn several hundred feet apart at 1.5 Gbps and reports 1.5 years without trouble. Another operator measured about 600 Mbps instead of 1,000 in torrential rain at 650 ft, which was a slowdown rather than an outage. An airFiber 60 LR deployment tested at 3 km is the long-distance proof point, and it is still a quarter of that radio's rating.

At 60 GHz, the distance you can use depends on weather margin and line of sight more than on the rating. Rain and wet snow on the radio's face cost signal. A leaf or branch in the path can stop the link. A quarter-mile path on a 1.5 km radio leaves about four times the margin, which is why this brief picks the Wave Pico over bigger dishes. Going bigger has costs too. The Wave Nano's 1.4° beam is much harder to aim than the Pico's 6°, and high-gain radios on a short link can overdrive each other.