[HN Gopher] Point-to-point Wi-Fi bridging between buildings-the ...
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Point-to-point Wi-Fi bridging between buildings-the cheap and easy
way
Author : Tomte
Score : 49 points
Date : 2021-08-20 19:18 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| Scoundreller wrote:
| > Most people in rural areas should use 2.4 GHz for its greater
| range and penetration
|
| Uhhhh, well; 900mhz would be better if you need penetration.
|
| As for range, the higher the frequency, the narrower the fresnel
| lenses and therefore the better the range you get without tall
| towers.
|
| What makes 2.4 particularly usable in rural areas is that you'll
| have the lowest amount of interference (usually).
|
| What I like about this install is that they're going through
| glass, which might even be worse for RF than the barn wall.
| UI_at_80x24 wrote:
| I'm disappointed in this article for several reasons. Ars used to
| be such a great tech/news site.
|
| I would have much more interested if they had dug a trench,
| installed fiber, or hell UTP CAT5 or CAT6. [0] This wasn't a
| 'tricky' task, you are operating within spec of all network
| cabling released in the last 20+ years.
|
| As another posted pointed out, 800m would have made for a more
| interesting story even if it was just buried fiber-optic cabling.
|
| The other part that annoys me is that no foresight for the future
| was taken into consideration. Let's assume that there are no
| trees blocking the line-of-site between the two antennas. Will it
| remain clear and obstruction free for the next 10 years? What
| about 20? I have a cable conduit installed between my house and
| my garage. 30'ish feet. That conduit has not had a problem since
| 1985 when it was installed. The cabling was upgraded from
| intercom to phone to network CAT5. Being out in the elements will
| age your equipment.
|
| Future proofing AKA How often do you want to climb up that
| ladder: Wireless tech has horrible shelf life and is quickly
| surpassed. Data needs are always increasing. The 1Gb/s switch I
| installed back in the 2000's can still handle the workload today,
| but the wireless AP I installed 5 years ago is buckling under the
| load that it can't accommodate.
|
| This article is as impressive as telling us the story of how they
| might have upgraded their service from 1Mb/s DSL to 10Mb/s cable.
|
| [0]For twisted-pair Ethernet, maximum cable length is 100 m
| (Cat-6A for 10GBASE-T, Cat-5e for 1000BASE-T or 100BASE-TX, Cat-3
| for 10BASE-T).
| kryptn wrote:
| I thought it was pretty interesting. It seems like you missed
| the point of the article, in fact it seems like the point was
| exactly the opposite.
|
| > The good news is, with the right gear, you can connect your
| home to an outbuilding without either professional expertise or
| a ditch witch and a spool of burial-grade cable.
|
| > Our goal in this exercise is not to geek out as hard as
| possible by mounting and aiming everything with millimeter
| precision. Instead, we're simply out to demonstrate that
| wirelessly connecting two buildings quickly, cheaply, and
| easily is possible for anyone. In fact, you can even enjoy
| more-than-acceptable results in the end.
|
| > When you want to extend a network from one building to
| another, the best answer is almost always a cable--preferably a
| burial-grade cable, either Ethernet or fiber, laid in a conduit
| and buried several feet underground. But that's expensive. If
| all you need is good Internet access in a nearby pool house or
| barn, it's almost certainly overkill.
|
| A low-effort, low-cost, low-commitment solution is sometimes
| all you need.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| A $100 wifi link with off the shelf equipment sounds more
| interesting to me (and applicable to my life) than a $1000
| trench with fiber.
| 0x000000001 wrote:
| Why are Americans allergic to aerial cable runs? Fiber and
| Ethernet are low/no voltage and don't need to be buried to
| comply with the electrical code.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| I can't speak for all Americans, but in the two cases when
| I've set up a Wifi link:
|
| #1 - I don't really want an aerial cable running through my
| back yard, plus it'd have to be pretty high to give enough
| clearance for the septic pumping truck.
|
| #2 - running cable between the 10th and 13th floor of
| buildings across the street from each other would require
| permission from both building owners, and maybe a permit
| from the city too. While a wifi link just sits in the
| windows on each side.
| Faaak wrote:
| I used ubiquiti rocket M5 to go from my house (without internet)
| to my parents house (21km away). It works well (50mbit/s).
|
| For the curious:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/j4y4f4/my_21km_p2p...
| j_walter wrote:
| I've used Ubiquity AirMAX products (2x nano m900 if I remember
| correctly) for my point to point network sharing between my house
| and shop for a few years now without issue. Both are PoE and both
| ends transmit through walls without much signal loss. I don't
| need super fast throughput since it's just a shop, but I still
| get >100Mbps consistently.
| gandalfian wrote:
| He used tp-link gadgets to go 80m through some tree to his shed.
| Glad he's happy but not really that far? 800m would have been
| more interesting.
| gregsadetsky wrote:
| Mikrotik has a number of point-to-point products [0] some of
| which are pretty inexpensive ($50 per device). Promotional
| material for the DISC Lite5 mention a ~5-10km range.
|
| The LDF [1] in particular is intriguing -- it is "meant to be
| installed on satellite offset dish antennas" i.e. you can re-
| use a (potentially already installed) dish antenna as a
| reflector.
|
| Configuring these devices is not exactly intuitive though.
|
| [0] https://mikrotik.com/products/group/wireless-systems
|
| [1] https://mikrotik.com/product/rbldf_5nd#fndtn-gallery
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| Watch out, it's 100% possible to do long ranges over WiFi but
| the speed tradeoff at long distances can be significant.
| Devices made for long-range use will either autoselect or
| allow you to manually select an encoding, which will need to
| be lower-rate as the range increases.
|
| Documentation often gives radio performance values for
| different encodings, e.g. the Mikrotik DISC Lite5 gives Tx
| and Rx specs starting from 6Mbps (essentially 802.11a) up to
| MCS9 (256 QAM) which can do well over a gigabit. We can do
| some naive calculations to estimate that MCS9 is achievable
| at up to 5km (really pushing it) while 6Mbps works out to
| 50km or more! In practice there are other factors that will
| limit these because you start getting into fresnel zones and
| such, especially as you get over a few km.
|
| The Ubiquiti devices are a bit more expensive but are easier
| to work with than Mikrotik. They also have higher-end options
| available for very long range use, 50-100km type scenarios,
| although the data rate gets very low.
| gtvwill wrote:
| Mikrotik has gear for punching that far. Mikrotik >
| ubiquiti. If the setup is overwhelming you probably don't
| have the knowledge to legally throw a WiFi >500m and not
| get arrested. (You need acma license in aus for any links
| >800m off memory). You shouldn't be doing long WiFi links
| if you don't know what your doing.
|
| On the shorter end of things tho lol mikrotiks new app make
| setup as pleb as ubiquiti if you need that level of
| simplicity. Devices cost about 1/3rd too. I don't sell
| anything else for WiFi or networking unless you need >10gb
| mmwave....which you don't.
| walshemj wrote:
| If you have consumer gear with connectors you can add some
| high gain antennas and get decent distance PTP - you could do
| this with the old favorite WRT54G
|
| Main thing is mount them high up and you need some protective
| enclosures.
| unstatusthequo wrote:
| For $100, not bad though. Sure you could do Ubiquiti, but not
| for $100 and since a lot of Ubiquiti gear is sold out right
| now, at least he got it done.
| [deleted]
| Scoundreller wrote:
| If you just need _one_ ptp link, you should be able to find a
| used set of their older stuff. It's an 80m link and you're
| not trying to keep your CPEs consistent like a WISP.
| mustardo wrote:
| Thats what I did, used second hand locoM2 units from a WISP
| for $20-40 each
| bostonsre wrote:
| Think I've read that these things can go a lot further. Took a
| look at them a while back and they are pretty neat. Was
| contemplating getting one for my apartment and one for my
| backpack so I could work on the lake in front of my apartment.
| tshaddox wrote:
| It was interesting to me because I had no idea there was
| relatively affordable consumer gear like this. I was into
| "cantennas" back around 2005 or so but hadn't thought or read
| about point to point wireless connectivity for many years.
| lisnake wrote:
| I've built 2 km radio bridge to my parents house over congested
| city area using 2 ubiquiti airFiber routers. Wasn't even that
| hard. I think they were using 60ghz spectrum
| bserge wrote:
| I used a couple of these: https://www.tp-link.com/us/business-
| networking/antenna-and-a...
|
| And 2 cheap Asus routers for 400 meters. Would've likely worked
| for twice that distance.
|
| Iirc the total cost was less than 200 Euros. Pretty cheap and
| easy, too.
| jessaustin wrote:
| It's nice to try out something new and write about it. In this
| case, IEEE 1901 devices would probably be cheaper, faster, and
| more reliable than IEEE 802.11. Also, that doesn't look like
| "80m" to my eye... if that distance is correct it implies that
| the hatchback is between 7m and 8m long, which seems about twice
| what one would expect.
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(page generated 2021-08-20 23:01 UTC)