Long distance switching with ethernet

[himu73]

Hi,

I have two buildings which are 700 ft apart. I need to connect two buildings with ethernet cat6 cable (temporarily, fiber will be used later). Can I just put two ethernet switches between buildings to cover the cat6 distance range? Any suggestions.

Thanks

 

[bill001g]

Yes you can use switches every 100 meter to in effect repeat the signal. There likely is some limit on how many times you can do this but it is likely some huge number.

The general problem with doing this is getting power to the middle switches and keeping them dry. There are some switches you can run on PoE but putting more than 1 in a chain I don't know how you would accomplish.

Almost any other solution would be a waste of money if you have fiber being installed.

Make sure you have OM3 fiber run if you are running multimode. It is not that much more expensive and it can run 10g.

 

[Solandri]

If you have line of sight between the two buildings, a wireless bridge with directional antennas can span 700 ft easily. Lots of people make a cantenna for a few bucks for this purpose.

http://www.wikihow.com/Make-a-Cantenna

 

[himu73]

If you have line of sight between the two buildings, a wireless bridge with directional antennas can span 700 ft easily. Lots of people make a cantenna for a few bucks for this purpose.

http://www.wikihow.com/Make-a-Cantenna

But, how much distance a wireless bridge will cover? I need around 215m to cover.

 

[bill001g]

It is outright stupid to build silly cantenna stuff anymore. They perform very poorly and really are only for people who want to do it for free.

If you have clear line of sight you can use many outdoor bridge devices that can go the short distance you have with ease. Most are rated in kilometers. Total cost other than mounting is likely in the $150 range. Look at companies like engenius or ubiquiti. I have used devices from both companies.

The down side is it is still based on wireless and it is half duplex so you will not get tremendous speeds. You might get 100m but it really depends on the traffic it does best if the traffic is primarily in a single direction.

Now ubiquiti has some cool looking things they call airfiber that they claim gig speeds on....bet they don't but I suspect it will be much faster than anything else because it uses different radios so it is full duplex. Still it is over $1000 per end so I have not been able to play with them.

 

[Solandri]

I suggested cantennas because they covered 200m easily when I made them at my former workplace, and are cheap. Since this is a temporary fix, I assumed he didn't want to spend a lot of money on hardware.

I also tried the cantennas on a ~500m gap and they didn't perform well (still connected, but bandwidth was atrocious). We ended up using retail flat panel directional antennas to bridge that gap. About $75 per antenna in 2005 if I remember right, with PoE so the only cable running to the antennas was the network cable. Those worked flawlessly while I was there, and AFAIK still work fine since they were still in place last time I visited.

The only tricky part is aiming. Connect all the hardware and aim the two antennas at each other while they're in the same room, then configure them. That way you know the configuration is correct and works. Then mount the antennas where you want them, and work on aiming them. Software or router firmware which shows signal strength in real-time is a huge help.

I'm using a big $50 parabolic antenna at my current workplace (because Verizon sucks and won't upgrade their phone lines so the fastest DSL we can get is 3 Mbps). It's mounted on the roof and aimed at a wifi hotspot a mile away (the hotspot does not have a directional antenna). Easily gets 45 Mbps over 802.11n, which is a limit of the hotspot, not the wifi connection.

 

[Kewlx25]

Never connect copper anything between two buildings. Difference in the grounds can cause equipment damage.