wiring 11 Maine summer cabins for Internet

You'd want a switch with 2 fibre ports and X RJ45 ports. The D-Link DGS-1224T would do the job, but is probably a little "overkill" for your purposes. (Unless you want up to 22 gigabit ports per cabin.) Alternativly fibre-twisted pair media converters and any old switch.

The range access point manufacturers give is for hard vacuum. Signals being reflected deminish the useful range, due to destructive interference and multipath effects.

With walls it matters a great deal what the wall is made from, even how far apart nails/screws are.

Typically the directional antenai are custom built, see if you can find a local radio ham to advise you. Probably the last thing you would want to do is amplify the output from 11 WAPs, since they will just end up interfering with each other.

There are LOTS of factory made WIFI antennas.

The FCC has a slice if the 5GHZ (802.11a) band that is approved for 1 watt RF, and large antennas, that will certainly cover the ground, if I recall correctly (1/4 mile to the most remote cabin.) It's 54mb/sec, which is lots of bandwidth, even for VIOP. See;

Take a look at

?EDC=517742

This looks like $2700 for the head-end AP equipment. $$ for the head-end outdoor antenna. Omni, or mildly directional as appropriate $700/yr support contract (not sure what this gets you) $400/cabin for cabin-end RF equipment. $$ small directional outdoor antenna on each cabin. may not be necessary, depending on head-end signal strength. Install only when shown necessary. $$ some cat5 cabling and a tiny hub in each cabin to give the customer a jack to plug his laptop into. A SIP phone in each cabin. Look on ebay for "CICSO SIP PHONE". They seem to go to $200 each Some head-end VOIP gateway. I'm a data and WiFI guy. I'd like to hear what you guys would propose here.

If you find a local ham radio operator he can eyeball the buildings and property and give you reality-check on antennas. Tell him it's 1 watt in the 5Ghz band. best case, none, or only the farthest buildings will need outdoor antennas. Ordering the bits and pieces for the radio gear is fussy, but any local ham can do it for you for a few bucks.

For this application VOIP is fine, IMO. It _is_ the Main woods after all, and it's not buisness critical since the backup plan is a public POTS phone in the main office.

Direct-TV has a business packages. I bet they have one for motel operators. Putting a SAT antenna on each cabin is easy and the customer can do his own PPV, etc, and charge it to his credit card. You might even get a comission. Cheap and easy to insatall.

Done. Voice, TV, and Internet up with the first cabin wired the day after the UPS truck delivers the gear. Not cheap, but either is the aternatives.

This is equipment _not_ compatible with the WiFI gear the customers have in their laptops. Putting customer-WIFi in public areas would be easy and a nice touch.

The only thing is to select an ISP for the upstream bandwidth. You need business-grade DSL, or the equivalant offering from your cable providor, delivered to the main building. Verizon has been doing a good job for my clients lately.

As for SIP phone-to-POTS conversion, you can probably get an outfit like Vonage to do this gateway instead of doing it in your equipment. The trade off with vonage is a monthly cost, plus more upstream bandwidth. If you run your won gateway you need a couple more POTS lines installed on your head end.

Maybe if you give be a cabin to live in for a week I'll come up and install this for you. Maine is lively in the (early) fall.

Did you crimp plugs? Are you sure you didn't split a pair? That creates lots of interference.

Yes. Unless you have odd local codes, clamp the NID ground onto the building stake.

Just don't try to punchdown stranded. Choice of patchpanel or blocks(110 or 66) will depend on PBX input connectors -- patchpanel for jack input, blocks for IDC punchdown

You can, but the life will be less than gel-filled. How much less depends on the moisture ingress.

Usually run LV in one conduit. With end-feed, it may taper down. Obviously separate from power! Distance much less important with good cable or fiber. Cat5 for POTS should help keep the 60Hz hum out of the phones.

-- Robert

The 350' ethernet limit is not a problem if you terminate each run to a hub in each building then start the run to the next building out of that hub. If you can afford to plow cable it's the most robust solution.

I have a similar project but the distances are larger and i couldn't afford cable even for your size project.

Learn about the Linksys WRT54G router combined with the

replacement firmware called Satori. The WRT's can be found for $60 each, one can serve as the router and the satori firmware can configure the rest as AP's or repeaters. You can set them to manage bandwidth and prioritize things like VOIP, you can adjust the radio mw, you can attach after-market antennas if they are needed.

I'm beginning to build out a network based on the above and it is going very well. There is a learning curve. Radio is fussy and needs finessing and patience. You should buy a few WRT's, confgure them, and do some testing. You may find the WRT's can do it all for you.

"dk253" kirjoitti viestissä news: snipped-for-privacy@posting.google.com...

This is the classical Neighborhood Networking problem: How to connect buildings in a neighborhood to a network at minimal costs? The question has global significance, there are hundreds of thousands of neighborhoods with a need for an Ethernet network, many of them in developing countries with minimal finacial means.

The hardware costs for a network like this are at minimum about $500 - $1000. (For this low price you may have to spend some time at eBay.com.)

Others in this group (.cabling) will propose more expensive solutions. They may better suit your needs and your family's financial situation. On the other hand, I presume your parents are hard working people and try to streach every penny.

In theory you could connect all cabins with nothing but Cat5 cable. You could use 100 meter stretches of cable (even 150 meters for 10Base-T) and daisy-chain switches. The reason not to this is lightning. You need to electrically isolate your network into smaller segments. For this you need fiber.

Running fiber to each cabin is in my opinion unnecessary. You can connect near-by cabins with Cat5 cable as long as the distance is under 100 meters.

1. Divide the cabins into clusters of 2 - 4 near-by cabins. Place 5- or 8-port switch in the central cabin. Connect the others by Cat5 cable. 2. Pull one pair of fiber to the switch in each cluster. Place a 5-port fiber switch in the center of the network.

I suppose you have electricity connected to each cabin. Most likely the power cables are aerial cables suspended on wooden poles. You should hang your Ethernet-network from the same poles.

For Cat5 you should use gel-filled outdoor cable. The price may be twice what you pay for (flamable) indoor cable.

Terminating fibers in rural Maine may be expensive. It is better to use pre-terminated fiber cables. On ebay you may sometimes find 100 meter indoor jumper cables. These are usually rated "plenum" so they may in fact be more resistant to the elements than normal PVC "riser" cable. You will need to find some way of protecting the cable from sunlight. Maybe wrapping duct tape around the cable and and a support wire will do the trick.

Also note that the fiber does not need to extend end-to-end, as long as it provides the isolation. You can bring the fiber-to-Cat-5 converters half-way and provide power "over Ethernet" in the same cable.

Hardware:

On eBay you can get old 3Com fiber switches for about $25. These SuperStack

3000FX switches do not support the newer 802.1Q VLAN tagging so they are being replaced.

In each Cat5 cluster you can use a 8-port switch with one 100Base-FX fiber port (about $150 new) or a cheap 5-port 100Base-TX switch ($20) + Etherent media converter ($25 ebay).

You could also add a WLAN access point to each cabin to give freedom of movement and also to protect your visitors expensive laptop from the occasional lightning strike.

IP-service:

For the network you will also need a NAT-router to share the Internet connection. Your traffic will likely be light so you will manage with any broadband router.

For more traffic and users you will need a router with a traffic shaper. The two prime candidates are: 1) the Linksys WRT54G wireless router with sweasoft or OpenWRT firmware 2) a PC + Compact Flash card + m0n0wall

It should be noted that the 100Mbps Ethernet network can carry more traffic that you will ever generate (or your ISP will ever carry). In fact the network could well serve over a thousand users and PCs. I believe Ethernet based neighborhood networks have great potential in the developing world. In urban areas Ethernet service can be set up for under $5. (For possible cabling solutions see: ... beirut3 ;-)

***

This post is not so much about cabling as about neighborhood networking. I am still looking for the English language group to discuss these issues. For lack of a better group I am cross-posting this to news:uk.telecom.broadband

I've rethought this.

A) Pull telco-grade cable through each cabin. I think 25 pair will be overkill. (?12 cabins?)

B) Tap one pair per cabin for POTS.

C) Choose one pair, and put HPNA Ethernet adapters on it in each cabin. That's the "ethernet over phone line" technologly. Run each adapter to a local 5-port switch, and put a plate in with 2-3 jacks.

Here's why:

You need the phone cable anyhow, barring bizzare VOIP over 802.11 schemes.

The HPNA stuff is cheap; I've seen it surplus at Mendelsons. Buy 3x what you need for spares and file it away. It's not blazingly fast (1 MB, I think) but what's upstream anyhow?

There may be a wire-length limit issue. If so, split the pair at the middle cabin and put one adapter on each leg, with the switch between.

It's going to be more lightning/zap proof than anything ethernet [except of course fiber...]. It's designed to sit on pairs going outside, and ignore 300v+ 20Hz ringing, etc.

Rule number one. Cable is cheap. Installalation is not. Pull in more pairs than you think you'll need.

You missed my drift; overkill is GOOD. I just can't recall the standard put-ups for direct burial ICKY-PIC...

Oh! I forgot. Put a protector at each cabin.

Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't a T1 in the neighborhood of 1.5mbps? That isn't any faster than a typical DSL connection around here, slower in fact.

--Dan

The dsl download is faster, but the DS1 (proper term for T1) may have faster upload.

DSL is an "up to" service. Plus ADSL is not symmetric. Typically the download is about 6 times the upload. T1 is a set service. You pay for 1.5m you get 1.5m. And it's usually (always?) symmetrical. Same speed both ways.

A great problem to ponder...

I've learned a few things in reading all the postings.

My 2 cents:

I've installed a bunch of Cisco LRE which is a highrate DSL over telephone wire lately and it is pretty inexpensive, even when buying direct from Cisco. There's a central switch that supports 8 or 16 remote devices and single-port or 4-port devices at the outboard end. Judging by my travels over the last couple of years, this gear is being installed in lots of hotels because it uses a single pair of telephone wire, has a max range of

5000 feet, and 'up to 15Mbps' of bandwidth. If you lay/pull/hang your own wire, the quality will be good and you will get the 'up to' bandwidth over our quarter mile.

The other options mentioned all seem potentially expensive/obsolete/overly-complex, etc. Coax and fiber both require electronics that are either rare or expensive and the cabling isn't easy either.

My ideal solution would not be the simplest, but it would be:

- Cisco LRE for Ethernet to all the cabins

- A couple of APs to cover the public areas outside the cabins

- Dishes on the cabins for TV.