simple wireless backhaul

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goodcooper

[H]F Junkie
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wanted to get you guys' opinion on this...

i could have posted this on ubnt forums, but i like you guys better here...


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here are my buildings... i've got a quoted fiber price on this, but probably won't have approval for it until july/august some time, but the current underground copper running between the buildings i'm having serious problems with, especially when we have storms or any other type of moisture....

they most definitely won't run at gig either, so it's definitely being replaced....

the problem is now we've got a voip system using these same underground copper lines between the buildings, so when one of the lines goes down, they're dead in the water... looking into a simple wireless backhaul to tide them over until the fiber install... i want to do 5ghz (dual band uap-pros are inside each building, so it's not without it's noise, but most clients inside are using 2.4ghz)

honestly something not 2.4 or 5 would probably be best, but for right now i'm going with 5ghz...

there are some trees in front of a few of the buildings, but i'm thinking at this range it shouldn't be an issue...

these will be mounted on the tops of the front walls of each building (around where the numbers are):
http://www.data-alliance.net/servlet/-strse-262/Antenna-Mount-Pole-Wall/Detail

these will be used on buildings 1, 3, 4, 5:
http://www.data-alliance.net/servlet/-strse-227/NanoStationM5-Loco-LOCOM5-Ubiquiti/Detail

on building 2, my main hub, i was looking for a picostation type device, omnidirectional, but noticed ubnt doesn't make a 5ghz picostation...

does anybody have any experience with the bullet radios? i could mount a bullet on building 2 with an omni antenna, my only other option is to either use an outdoor unifi, or go up to a rocket, which is super overkill with such a short distance

http://www.data-alliance.net/servlet/-strse-167/Ubiquiti-Bullet5-1000mW-WAP/Detail

with one of these alfa omnis:
http://www.data-alliance.net/servlet/-strse-219/Antenna-15dBi-5.8Ghz-5Ghz/Detail#
that's a 15dbi that would probably be super overkill...

not sure if this would work or not:
http://www.data-alliance.net/servlet/-strse-770/Antenna-5GHz-9dBi-omni/Detail


what do you think?

i'd probably be turning down the power on all these devices quite a bit
 
I have used Rocket on a client of mine on the top of the building with 2 sector antenna.

then I used the UBNT units that look like satelite dishes. Been very reliable.
 
Ubiquiti did make 5ghz picostations, I have one. They are legacy now. At that distance, I think anything Ubiquiti with a omni would work.
 
If that is to scale, I don't see how expensive fiber could be. Can it be strung aerial between the buildings? I did a small fiber job for about a grand running UV outdoor fiber aerial between two buildings, maybe 30ft apart. Most of the money was in termination (I subbed it out since I don't have the tools or testing equipment), fiber connectors, and 2 media converters. I'd search high and low in the budget just make the fiber project happen now.
 
hawk82 said:
If that is to scale, I don't see how expensive fiber could be. Can it be strung aerial between the buildings? I did a small fiber job for about a grand running UV outdoor fiber aerial between two buildings, maybe 30ft apart. Most of the money was in termination (I subbed it out since I don't have the tools or testing equipment), fiber connectors, and 2 media converters. I'd search high and low in the budget just make the fiber project happen now.
Click to expand...

having fiber run between the buildings, and the quote was for $5500, conduit is already in place... that's running the fiber, terminating, testing all pairs, etc...

it's in my erate priority 2 stuff, so if we get approval in july/august timeframe, i'll get reimbursed 90% on it...

it'd be a waste of money to do it before then (like.... $5k waste of money)

also i can always use this equipment at other sites once the fiber is run...
 
Personally, i would also look into mikrotik products. Routerboard.com

Never hurts to look at all your options.
 
Interestingly enough. I am selling a ton of Ubiquiti PTP equipment & have many Unifi 3-packs available.

My suggestion is using a Rocket M5 with a omni antenna in a central locationand then Nano station M5s on each building...

Fibre itself is actually pretty easy to run and terminate.
 
I'd just use 8 nanostation M5s and use them as wireless bridges to link each building to the next.

It should give you close to 100Mbps performance between buildings.

http://www.amazon.com/Ubiquiti-Nano...qid=1364501580&sr=8-2&keywords=Nanostation+M5

Doing it the way you are suggesting would give you better performance if ONLY one wireless bridge is accessing data at a time. Otherwise the throughout will drop.

My suggestion gives a dedicated path between each building with less interference.

Building 4 talks to 3
3 talks to 2
2 talks to 1

Buildings 1 and 4 each would have 1AP
Buildings 2 and 3 would have 2 APs
 
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I wouldn't use router board as suggested. Their routers are great but for wireless, Ubiquiti is way better.
 
/usr/home said:
I wouldn't use router board as suggested. Their routers are great but for wireless, Ubiquiti is way better.
Click to expand...

AFAIK Ubiquiti doesn't currently support OSPF very well which makes doing this setup the right way much harder. Mackintire makes my point. OSPF makes it easier and faster under saturation. The MikroTik hardware supports it right out of the box, and it's pretty darn simple to set up.

Routerboard just came out with their SEXTANT G 5HPnD, which actually takes advantage of 2x2 mimo 5GHz with a better antenna, which was the previous products downfall.

You do also have to consider if the network is currently broken up into different subnets (like it should be). If it isn't, OSPF isn't going to do much good.
 
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He doesn't need to worry about routing protocols if he's just doing layer 2 bridges. No reason to run the wireless devices as routers, he either already has them at the locations for the current underground cat5 or he doesn't have enough devices in the buildings to warrant it. (from what I can gather)

We;ve had good success with the Aruba mesh gear but it's probably a)overkill for what you are doing, and b)more than you are going to pay for the fiber.

If I were in this situation, I would set up each building with its own p2p link, so the hub or building two would have 4 access points on it, every other building will have one. So you would need 8 ap's in my scenario. Any other setup with multiple AP's talking to another single AP and you could have contention issues, and one single point of failure could take out multiple buildings.

With 5ghz gear you have enough channels available and at that range you are looking at 200-250mbps on a 300mbps radio.

Another consideration since voip is in the mix is QoS. I don't think the ubiquiti gear has any kind of QoS or wireless queue priority system, so you can't say "all traffic headed to/from my sip proxy" or "all voice traffic" is higher priority.
 
they are going to be just layer 2...

and yes i did think about that central device being overloaded a bit by having 4 clients connected simultaneously, but at the same time i can't really see any use scenario where buildings would ever need to talk to any other building besides building 2... thus my bandwidth wouldn't really ever be negatively affected (halved) by having to retransmit to other building...

maybe the happy medium would be to put the nanostations on each building, and mount 2 nanostations on building 2... one for 3 and 4, and another for 1 and 5... the degree range on the nanostations should be good for that...

not enough devices to really split the subnets per building, and as of right now, voice and data share a subnet, that's obviously going to change sooner rather than later, but i'll wait on the fiber for that...

this is really just to tide us over until the fiber arrives...

i'm thinking 6 nanostation locom5s will do it for us... 2 mounted on building 2, 2 seperate hidden SSIDs on outside channels...
 
You're not seeing why your bandwidth will be cut with a single client from one building.

Wireless bandwidth is SHARED and it is duplex. If one client at building 3 is talking to the hub, it reduces the bandwidth available to ALL other clients, regardless of whether or not his traffic is leaving building 2 after it gets there.

With the devices being so cheap, I would do a dedicated bridge (2 aps) per building.
 
OP, how much bandwidth do you actually need and what is the budget? Without specifying either, we're going to get suggestions all over the place.
 
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