Alternate to wireless, or is WIFI the right solution?

Two wireless access points (not routers) with directional antenna will do the trick - as long as you have direct line of sight between the two buildings.

I am doing that now with two old Linksys WAP11 access points - connecting two buildings that are about 100 feet apart - using the standard antenna's that came with the units.

A real simple and low cost solution would be a Linksys WRT54G wireless router as your access point and a Linksys WAP54G Access Point in client mode at the other end would work fine. Mount them at different heights - one at 12 ft. roof level and the other perhaps twice as high.

Keep in mind you have to be under something like 5,000 ft. from the DSLAM. I forget the exact distance off the top of my head at the moment.

I'm less than 1700' from the DSLAM, but they've got "limited bandwidth" to the box, according to the East Indian 'expert' I talked with at customer service. According to them, I'm lucky I've got DSL at all.

LLoyd

I can put up masts as high as 40' without a problem.

I've never done anything with directional antennae on WIFI, just 'local' APs. Are these available commercially, or am I getting into beer-can antennae now?

How are they during torrential rain?

Thanks, LLoyd

Oh... why the different heights? I understand about the "Freznel (aperture? zone?)" and that one must get the antenna at least as high as half its width above the ground. But why different heights?

LLoyd

Looking at the WRT54G (and already having a WAP54G), I note there's no external antenna connections on these.

I'm reasonably competent at hacking into and attaching connectors to things that shouldn't have them. Is this the route(r) to take to attaching the directional antennae?

I know this one will sound stupid, but here goes.... there are two omnis on each unit now. Do they get replaced with two differently-polarized directional arrays, or is one antenna sufficient for each unit?

Thanks, LLoyd

Since the FCC considers 256k as broadband. Your 1.5Mbs dsl is not low bandwidth

Yes to all.

How does the second building get power? If the same phone line, chances are it's the same power too... Have you looked at powerline networking? doesn't have to be on the same circuit breaker, just on the same leg off the transformer (the easiest way to tell, do you have ONE meter for both buildings? That usually says they are on the same leg off the transformer

, under $100, faster than wireless at 85 Mbps, so you can upgrade speed easily on the DSL side).. Use it for most of my wireless/outbuilding installs.. Still wireless at the ends, just happens to be an alternative for the wired bridge part... Never have to worry about signal loss (rain, leaves growing, cars parking etc)... Just put a wap router on the far end connected to one of the two powerline bridges (DHCP off, same ssid different channel, and you have instant bridge/wired/wireless for about $150 - extra $50 for the second wap router....

Just to confuse you even more, while it has two omnis on it, they are not equal or split.... the antennas are actually BOTH alternataly switched and alternate which is active, so you can't do just one.... If you do something with just one, you are screwed....... (as per your q above, yes, TWO directional arrays, or tap into the signal before the splitter/switcher and just have one.....(have no idea where that may be, but others can give you tech details)

They're on separate transformers -- one's a barn/office, the other a home. But...

I guess I could run that over any copper between the buildings -- even an abandoned phone line....?

The cheapest ethernet extender kit I could find so far was about $130 (w/shipping), but good only to 1mbps.

I'll check out the carrier-current stuff, and see if it would suit the need.

LLoyd

the wrt54g's do have replaceable antenas (they just screw off) if you use somthing like ddwrt you can turn one antena off and use a directional antena from someone like hypertek

Look into both 2 baseT and 10 base T (the T is for twisted pairs, like old phone lines), the 2 or 10 is the speed in Mbps it can do... (2 would be way faster than the DSL you have now, and 10 will be faster than what you are thinking of getting).. They were made to run over old twisted pairs (like old phone lines), unfortunately, with the desire for bigger numbers, they are a bit hard to find nowadays Check

What is 10 Base-T?

10Base-T --- standard configuration that allows construction of 10 Mbps ethernet LANs over unshielded twisted-pair wire.

Under 10 Base-T, workstations are cabled using twisted-pair wire to medium access units (MAUs). Each MAU normally has a built-in attachment interface unit (AIU) that can be cabled to a coaxial transceiver attached to a coaxial cable. Thus, workstations can be configured in a star topology and cabled to a bus structured backbone cable that serves to interconnect MAUs.

Yep, thanks. I know all that. A Looooong time ago in a land far away, I was a networking supervisor, long before WIFI was even an itch. I'm even half-way tempted to try a hank of OSP, direct-burial cat5e over the 400' just to see if it can wheedle out a useful 5mbs without too many retries to be useful. But then, I'd sort of be comitting myself to hard-wired... and I'd like to do this with a 'new' technology, if it's reasonably inexpensive, and still reliable in the malicious weather we have in Florida in the summer.

My last 'real' install was in 1999; gigabit fiber in a government hub in some unnamed Southern US city.

(No, I don't have cleaving and termination tools anymore, so fiber is out -- costy, anyway)

LLoyd

What size data rate are you looking for? If you want a relatively cheap, efficient, and high speed solution for you problem, then I'd suggest checking out a small company called hField Technologies. They have a USB adapter called the Wi-Fire that you could connect to your computer, and it can send and receive signals for up to 1000'. I have one, and I definitely recommend it. I'm not exactly sure how it will do in the Florida rains, but if it's meant for up to 1000' ft, it should do fine for 400' in the rain.

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Point was to use what you have.. You said you already had an abandoned phone line (twisted pair), running between the buldings, and wanted something faster than your current 1.5 DSL (hence 2base t), and faster than a new DSL at 6 Mbps speed (hence the 10 base t)... As I recall from when I did that, a few years ago, on an old phone line to my garage, got the devices off ebay for about $20 (old star net stuff)... In place of the MAU's on the above, used WRT (Wap router) both inside and in the outbuilding which gave me both wired and wireless in both places (Linksys WRT54G at walmart for $48).. Did it both in Idaho and Tampa FL area (foliage growing, and bad weather, really screwed up wireless outside) I'm guessing that since you aren't the government, you probably want to do it the cheapest possible way... :)

you can actually turn off either antenna in the software, and it will work just as well as if both were on. It is just BS that you will be screwed by using one antenna.

Point is you have to turn one OFF, if you leave it on both, and disconnect one and wire an external antenna to the other, you will mess things up and be beyond screwed :)

I beg to differ. Diversity reception is a big win if you have a highly reflective environment, such as a typical house or office. You can get along without diversity, as there are plenty of access points with just one antenna, but you will find that as you move around, there will be more spots with deep fades. The problem is called "frequency selective fading". That's where two paths between the transmitter and receiver are exactly 180 degrees otto phase and cancel. With diversity, that happens much less. The improvement is much more with 802.11b than with 802.11g. ODFM (802.11g) divides the

22MHz of occupied bandwidth into a mess of independent carriers, each of which carries a part of the signal. The receiver recombines all these carriers to reproduce the original data. If one of these disappears, the thruput only slows down a little, but does not disappear. Since frequency selective fading will affect only one of these carriers at a time, ODFM is far more resiliant to multipath problems than 802.11b modulation methods.

Yep. Actually, having two different types of antennas can cause problems. See the golf course case study in the Cisco article below:

There were also some really nasty problems trying to use the two diversity antennas as a store and forward repeater between two clients. Typically, someone would run one stock rubber ducky antenna, and one external outside antenna for the neighbors. The diversity switch logic just didn't want to switch back and forth for each packet quickly enough. The result was incredibly slow thruput. This has been largely fixed with faster processors, but is still a problem at high speeds. However, it would work just fine for either client accessing the internet. It's just client to client that would be very very very slow.