Wireless point to point

[cmpwat]

Evening all.

 

I need to connect to buildings no more than 300m apart and am looking at wireless point to point and wondered if anyone has done this in the past and who and what equipment you used?

 

I have to look at wireless as it is impossible to install a fibre connection as there is a government oil pipe running under the car park and whilst it is possible to get the permission to lay a line, timeframe on the project doesn't allow for it.

 

Been looking at different products and really do not have a clue! Looking to get minimum of 100mbps. I am assuming that if the AP is connected to a switch then the connection is a backhual? Will this allow for users to logon to the network as normal?

 

If anyone can recommend some companies I can talk to, that would be most helpful.

 

Wayne

[MatthewL]

Two access points and bridge them. Do you currently have wireless?

 

Also is it not possible to run a external grade fibre above the head similar to how a phone line comes into a building, that would be more reliable.

[cmpwat]

We currently have a Dell/Aurba wireless in place, controller less. The APs will need to be outdoor.

 

We have thought about going above the ground but the distance between the buildings means the cable will be too long.

[CyberNerd]

I've done this. Been in place for 2 or 3 years. Works well except when kids kick (extremely well aimed) footballs at it.

IIRC We get around 300Mbs at probably 200-300M

We use 5GhZ ubiquiti nanostations

[plexer]

airFiber | Ubiquiti Networks, Inc.

 

Ben

[CyberNerd]

^ that would do.

looks like the generation above ours.

[dhicks]

We currently have a Dell/Aurba wireless in place, controller less. The APs will need to be outdoor.

 

We're using a couple of our standard Ruckus access points and an external IP-rated instrument box, £25 from Maplin. The access points are powered via Po and with Ruckus' system you just enable wireless meshing on the controller and the rest just happens. One access point is outside, the other one is several walls deep inside a very solid building, and we seem to get a good signal in all weathers. This has the advantage that we now have wireless coverage in the area between the two access pointsm which might be a handy bonus.

[cpjitservices]

Ubiquity kit is the best stuff to get for outdoor stuff. 300m is quite a distance just before you put anything up make sure no one else near to where your going to put up your antennas is also using antennas, if there are any ask see if anyone knows what frequency they are on because you dont want to use the same frequency. Also make sure you have good line of site, although the ubiquity stuff has a good beam range LOS is still good if you have it. Try and use the open 24Ghz frequency if you can as it's license free.... Just make sure no one near your 300m is using the same.

 

I have a friend whop does this type of thing for a living all over Europe, I am also considering doing a similar thing but over a 1Km distance.

[paulfinlay]

+1 for ubiquiti nanostation. 300m will be no problem providing you have line of sight. You should get somewhere in the region of 100Mbps of actual data throughput.

[jfinnigan]

I had a rather large Point to Point network at my former Job. It was using Ubiquiti Gear. It was for a Town Government I worked at, I had the main unit on top of the Town Hall->Went to a Cell Tower-> From there went to multiple water tanks and then to a few different buildings. only two or three buildings actually used it (like a very remote waste water building) for most it was just backup to the 1GB fiber. It worked great when it worked, which was most of the time. but Be warned, they take a beating from the weather to about every 2yrs you will be replacing them - which isn't cheap. Also make sure you get your wavelenghts right - with the point to point you have to mount one horizontal/vertical for certain wavelengths. I used Aurba for indoor APs but for outdoor point-2-point I didn't really like them.

 

Also you will want to do a site scan for nearby wireless at both locations (and maybe in between) make sure no one is one a channel to use and both locations. You should alos invest in some Ubiquiti Aerial cable it holds up better than just using Direct Barrier cable like most people do - it dries out in the air and degrades.

Edited May 25, 2013 by jfinnigan

[code9ster]

Ubiquiti air fiber! The only way to go! 1.4gps true throughput. We have one setup going to 2 school buildings works great. I will say the farther the distance the better. The alignment is hard to hit at close range.

[Gaz]

airFiber | Ubiquiti Networks, Inc.

 

Ben

 

Have you any experience of it @plexer ?

 

I'm planning for the future and this looks like a great within budget gigabit wireless link. Does anyone know of any UK suppliers?

[Chris_]

Have you any experience of it @plexer ?

 

I'm planning for the future and this looks like a great within budget gigabit wireless link. Does anyone know of any UK suppliers?

 

I think Wireless Access Points & Bridges, WiFi, Mesh, Point to Point & Multipoint, 3G & LTE Cellular Gateways - 4Gon - 4Gon Solutions and MS (Distribution) UK Ltd. - Wireless Antenna, RF Cables, Ubiquiti, PC Engines ALIX, MikroTik RouterBOARDS, 802.11n MIMO Radios and WiFi Accessories 2.4Ghz 5.8Ghz are the big suppliers in the UK.

[Gaz]

Excellent thanks. I did a quick google but my googlefu isn't great today.

At 2.7K thats a realistic option for us. Problem is the buildings are only about 150-200 meters away from each other and as code9ster said there may be problems with such a short distance.

[Chris_]

What sort of bandwidth do you need? We went for the NanoStations as we didn't really need gigabit speeds.

[m25man]

I've had 180 Mbps on Nano M5s over 6 Miles, I think 300m is well within earshot.

Air Fibre is awesome kit but requires some decent mounting and alignment and will attract the attention of the local tree huggers unless you can't locate it out of the obvious view.

[Gaz]

As it currently stands I have two buildings each with distinct networks. What I want to do is merge both networks into one network.

 

Building A will host the internet connection, servers, content filter and half our clients

 

Building B will host the other half of the clients. Building B will have a switch connected to the wifi for all the clients.

 

This is an area I don't have a lot of experience in but I'm just going on the basis that more speed = faster network connectivity. The internet (fiber optic) will also be carried across this link.

 

This would allow us to drop one of our internet connections and servers while cutting the management of two networks in half. Providing this idea I have in my head works like I think it should.

[m25man]

Whilst you are correct in your thoughts, your topology is flawed being wholly reliant on the single point of failure being the Wireless Bridge.

Even Air Fibre, fast as it is, being the only route between both sites and the Internet means that you have a lot of traffic determined to get across it all day long. It will become the busiest link on your LAN

[Gaz]

Isn't that true for any point to point link even ethernet or fiber optic cable? Would a site/domain trust be better over the wifi link? keeping 2 internet connections and also 2 content filters? I'm not even sure how that would work.

I'd still need two DCs.

 

I'm just trying to reduce the amount of network devices's actually needed.

[m25man]

Isn't that true for any point to point link even ethernet or fiber optic cable?

 

Absolutely, but your plan involves jumping from two networks with independent gateways to a single network with one gateway.

You need to carefully plan for this.

The killers (apart from the obvious Internet traffic) are profiles, logins, DNS internal, print spooling etc etc you could easily find yourself sending high levels of traffic using the link that you never imagined.

Should the networks be a separate routed subnet rather than a single bridged LAN?

 

Are you better off keeping specific servers each side of the link to localise traffic only soliciting Internet traffic across the bridge?

 

Consolidation into a single AD is great, bridging the LANs on a single collision domain not so great.

Simple things like having a print server at each site to keep printing traffic off the bridge link, local DNS servers at each site, DC at each site etc etc... You soon see the sense in subnetting each site and routing across the link instead.

 

You have plenty of options though, how many users/devices will there be on the remote network and what resources are needed on the local network?

 

100Mbps P2P Bridging is fine for the odd classroom, Single Gigabit link might be fine for an entire building with some Internet traffic but two fully operational school sites using a single internet breakout may be a big ask!

Throw in some VoiP across the link and you enter a whole new world.

 

I have one remote office that's now down to a single gigabit fibre link, there are around 50 users at the far end, when the VoiP is in full use and the LAN busy we get complaints that the Internet is slow and it takes too long to open a word file... This is as the QOS kicks in.

As soon as the phones hang up the LAN is fine.

When don't have the issue where the links are trunked.

 

You won't do any better than Air Fibre for the price, just don't ditch your other routes or Internet connections until you have worked out the traffic profile and are satisfied that a single Gigabit will be enough.

 

I have a large site with two schools Upper/Lower on a single domain with all resources on site A and have a 4 x Gigabit Fibre Trunk to link them.

On another site a 1 Gigabit MPLS works fine. It all depends on the traffic flow requirements.

[Gaz]

I Think airfiber is still the way to go, but I shall definately take on board keeping the current infrastructure and just routing some traffic between the link such as server syncing.

 

We have around 80 endpoints between the two buildings.

[Michael]

Really thick question, but so long as there's a line of site does it matter if one antenna is 5m off the ground and the other 10m for example? I've been given a similar project which is approx. 250m away. Is it easy to set up? Which make/model would you guys suggest for that distance? Ideally need 100Mbps minimum.

[cmpwat]

We were going to use the airfibre but then found out that they don't really work well below 100m. we cannot get our link over 100m without something in the way! We have been quoted for a Giga-Laser Link that will work at the 80m distance, gives us 1GB per second link, but will cost us £7,800. A lot of money but considerably less than trying to dig the car park and lay a cable.

[Gaz]

We were going to use the airfibre but then found out that they don't really work well below 100m. we cannot get our link over 100m without something in the way! We have been quoted for a Giga-Laser Link that will work at the 80m distance, gives us 1GB per second link, but will cost us £7,800. A lot of money but considerably less than trying to dig the car park and lay a cable.

 

I was also quoted laser a long time ago but they can be affected by weather quite a lot and given the amount of rain/fog/snow we get around here it wasn't really viable.

[plexer]

We were going to use the airfibre but then found out that they don't really work well below 100m. we cannot get our link over 100m without something in the way! We have been quoted for a Giga-Laser Link that will work at the 80m distance, gives us 1GB per second link, but will cost us £7,800. A lot of money but considerably less than trying to dig the car park and lay a cable.

 

Where did you find that from? I can't find any reference to minimum distances in their docs only maximum.

 

Ben