Point-to-Point Link

was55amg

Hello,

I'm new to wireless networks, i was wondering something so please tell me if I am right:

Let's say you want to connect to buildings at a distance of 4 miles.
You would need to plug an outdoor antenna and a Wireless Bridge at each location and align those antennas. Then you would connect the bridge to a switch in the LAN at each location. This makes those 2 locations appear as a single one in the same network. But i have seen drawings where instead of a switch, they were using routers. Why would you do that?
Also, when configuring the wireless bridges, which default-gateway are you going to set? the ip address of one of your router's interface (the one that routes traffic to the internet) ? or the ip of the bridge at the second building?

Thanks if you can help me, because I am reading materials but i need a practical exemple.

JDMurray

Bridges are layer 2 devices and know nothing of IP addresses. They route traffic using hardware (MAC) addresses. If the end-points of the link are two different layer 3 networks then you'd use routers. If the end-points are two different layer 2 networks then you'd use bridges. Everything is the same as on a wired or fiber LAN.