Bridge that Gap!

April 7, 2008 6:24 AM

In a similar vein to a previous question of mine, after successfully tackling that problem, I am now again trying to 'bridge that gap'. This time a neighbouring house in our community would like to be wired up for internet.

The houses in our community are networking with telephone wire. A G.HDSL bridge/router in each house separates data from telephone and functions as a switch. Other hubs/switches/routers can be daisy chained off of it as normal.

This house is a little further away than the previous house (in that situation I ran a regular CAT5e cable through an 25m existing conduit from a switch in one house to a switch in the other) so I'm not sure if the maximum possible CAT5 length of 100m will cut it. I don't know the exact distance to the house. It's probably about 70m ATCF. In addition, there's no conduit this time so I've no idea how I'd work that angle.

What are my options?

- Wifi mesh with the highly recommended Open Mesh technology?
- Fibre? I know next to nothing about fibre for networks. I know it's a based on light, that it's a good thing for speed etc and is expensive. That's it.
- Outdoor CAT5(e)/6 strung up in the trees somehow?
- Attaching an identical bridge/router to the telephone cable in their house and seeing if data magically appears at the other end? I've heard someone very non-technical mention lack of capacity about this but that can be taken with a big pinch of salt.
- Rooftop wifi 'beacon'?
- Others I haven't thought of?

Thanks a lot

posted by dance to computers & internet (2 comments total)

I'm sure that there are numerous options, but the first one that came to mind would be either a mesh network (not really all that usable unless you can put node points in between to help bridge) or some kind of directional antenna, (the Cantenna comes to mind) hooked up to the highest power wireless network you can get (Pre-N maybe?).

Otherwise I'd probably consider the Cat-5 option, though most of the runs I've worked with were considerably less than 100', so I don't know if you would need anything additional to amplify the signal. You would definitely want to use something weatherproof though as most Cat-5 is going to be rated for indoor use. My only fear is that if you hang it in trees that you will attract squirrels, these have a real taste for the insulation on cables like co-ax (I work in the cable industry, and I've seen the kinds of damage they can do in just a few weeks), and I can see them cutting through something smaller and lighter weight like Cat-5 relatively quickly.
posted by quin at 3:28 PM on April 7

ISTM that wifi with a couple of directional antennas (even relatively cheap ones like a cantenna or a diy biquad) is the easiest way to go. Since you're just bridging two fixed buildings, you don't need to worry about mesh routing; you could set up a point-to-point link (or set one end to be an access point).

Fiber isn't a crazy idea either, if you have a way to get the wire from point A to point B. You can buy little ethernet-to-fiber bridges designed for exactly this purpose (connecting two buildings' LANs) for, IIRC, a couple hundred $US; probably cheaper on ebay.

If plain old cat5 ethernet won't quite go the full distance, you could also put an ethernet switch (not a hub) at the midpoint, powered either locally or via a "poor-man's PoE" on the spare pairs. This is probably the cheapest/easiest non-wireless solution ... with wifi, there's always the chance that someone will park a van in between your endpoints or a bunch of heavy precipitation will knock out the link.
posted by hattifattener at 7:47 PM on April 7