Fibre will be the most cost effective route, unless its very close. The cost of fibre has come down a lot over the years as it is commonplace.

Fibre is far less prone to interferance over distance. You need to think about if the cable route will need a trench digging or will it run along a wall. A Trench is the best long term but more costly.

Microwave is ok if you dont own the land between the points and you must have line of sight.

There is a hrdware supplier called

 

We need to get a network connection to one of our distant offices that are curently not on our network, thing is its the other side of our site, what is the max limit for CAT 5 length?

Can you use repeaters or boosters, or is there a better way? (Fibre?)

I reckon its about 1/4 mile Max. Maybe less I'm crap at working out distances!!

 

100m end to end (inc patch)

 

You could use a repeater, but these usually need a power source, so not much cop if it's a field between you and the other office.

Two other solutions (IMO):

1) Fibre. Would give the best speed (100Mbps) but you would need a cable duct or something to put it in to keep it safe.

2) Wireless. Slower, current standards run at 11Mbps. If you have line of sight over the 1/4 mile , you could probably put the bridge in a window at each end and avoid the need for external antennas. Installation would take about 15 minutes!

We've done quite a lot of wireless installations for multi site LANs and they work a treat.

Cheers,

Chris.


[This message has been edited by ChrisB (edited 06 February 2001).]

 

Fibre is the best technical solution, but is also the most expensive. Repeaters or boosters should work, but they generally give more trouble and hugely increased latency when used in a daisy chain. You could also use thinwire (standard co-ax) if the distance is less that 185 meters or thickwire (probably the sort of co-ax you use for your backbone) I can't remember the specs for thickwire off the top of my head, but you shouldn't have any attenuation problems over 1/4 mile.

 

If you want to get really sexy, try microwave

Needs line of sight between the 2 antenna & can be affected by fog & rain.

 

Sorry, when I said wireless I meant microwave.

It operates in the ISM band, which is 2.4Ghz and isn't too far removed from the microwave in your kitchen at home. And no, you won't turn green or grow two heads!

Over short distances, you don't have to have true line of sight. One of our customers has an antenna behind a leaded window (we couldn't put it outside as it's a listed building).

None of our customers have reported problems due to the weather. If the weather is bad enough to drop a link, then there probably wouldn't be any staff in to notice it's gone down!

Infra-red links are susceptible to bad weather though but can go faster.

Chris.

 

Also bear in mind, if you are connecting two buildings together over copper, make sure you have your electrical grounding sorted out. Otherwise you have can big problems between the two sites. My recommendation would be to go multimode fibre which isn't that expensive and will save you the hassle of electrical grounding problems.

Chris

 

There's a box called the LES-100 (LAN Extender Segment), I think it's made by Netgear, but it will convert 100base-T Ethernet to fibre to sort out those annoying 'over 100m' runs.

For cabling, I usually use blackbox, but for fibres Auriga seem to be cheaper.

[This message has been edited by carl (edited 06 February 2001).]

 

What about a simple, cheap router at each end?

I've got a pair of ISDN routers you can have for peanuts. Hell, they'll even do NAT to the Internet too!

DV

 

DV

Remember this is the UK. Have you seen how much BT charge for ISDN calls?

But bearing in mind, I can see where DV is coming from, how about an ADSL connection? Certainly be cheaper than ISDN.

Chris

 

Got lots of money and a line of sight?
Gigabit laser...
Biiiitch to line up though, gives you headaches and cataracts.

Greg

 

Dr Hu,

if you decide to use cable, ie fibre, mail me to discuss......would you like a quote!!

Zak.

 

Chris, yeah ISDN is a rip off.

BT offer £120 month or qtr(?) worth of free calls now.

As for BT's ADSL - well, its £40 / month with 50:1 contention ratio and £150 install fee. I see Freeserve and AOL are suiing them over their unfair deal BT offered on this very service.

Personally I've just got a cable modem for £33 per month, 24hr unmetered access, 10:1 contention ratio.

 

Dr Hu

We have loads of sites with remote offices. We use fibre all the time and find it cost effective, as long as the cable can be run relatively easy. Microwaves for example, a 36 meg link are 30k installation, 6k maintenance, 1k licence (all ball park figures). Fibre would be in the region 1.5k installation, then used two 3Com hubs with fibre modules for £700, these also will have the 10meg ports for the desktops.

Skip.

 

Thanks for all the input guy's.

I have just found out that we may have a duct installation under the carpark, so I think fibre is the way to go....Interesting about the line of sight wireless though!!

Cheers All.

Dr Hu