Inter Connecting buildings
 

Just working on a picece of course work. I have 5 buildings
4 of which as within 100ft of one another. The other is 200miles away.

Now, for the 4 im not sure of the best method.
Im looking at ATM over leased lines.

But im interested to know what people in industry would do!
Thanks

S

fibre between 4, and it depends on howmuch traffic fr the remote site... and what type of traffic... leased lines or frame relay...
thats how i'd do it andhave done on many occasions...
dazza

Same here, we have fibre to the 'local' buildings and frame relay circuits to the WAN.

wouldnt fibre mean ripping the road up?or are ducts commonly down already? that was my immediate solution actaully!!

remote sites bigger then the two smaller ones. small ones 30-60 people per office. remote has 200 which supplies email + internet access!

si

We already ripped up the road a while back, so we have ducting that runs under the main road and a series of ropes to pull cables.

Some telecommunications/cable companies will let you share their ducting to run cables.

Cool might be an option then!! I would def have fibre.

Is ATM an out of data solution now then?

Si

A wired solution is the best if all the buildings are so close. It's a decision any business would take, but based on the costs and hassles of digging up roads. I know local councils that have used point-to-point laser links between buildings.

The trouble with leased lines is you pay by distance and number of exchanges in between. We pay around £5Kp.a. for 25-miles and just 512K bandwidth. If you want good bandwidth, then it's a LOT of money.

Larger ISP's have their own national infrastructure. They sell a lot of solutions where they give you a POP into their network and then you can utilise their existing kit to provide high-speed network connections between sites.

They give you your own IP address range and segment the network so that your traffic is completely secure and doesn't go anywhere near other customers or Internet traffic.

The likes of Telewest do the same thing, but use their existing voice/data network rather than their Internet network.

If I was looking at a business solution it would depend on:-

Distance
Bandwidth Required
Security
Service Levels required
Costs
Management/Maintenance/Support

There's no "ideal" as all will have some compromise in one of those areas.

Stefan

fibre i think between the 4 little sites. Im confused as to how to connection/share resources with the site.

sites are slough/windsor so only 4miles opps!! lol!!

Fibre again?

Si

What do you mean? share printers, network shares, etc.. ??

They'll all be wired together, so it'll just appear as one big LAN. You would segment them using switches and IP addressing. You can use other technologies like WINS/DNS to help users resolve device names or browse resources.

Obviously, you've got 4 buildings in the campus. You could connect them in a chain (simplest) or use one as the hub and run the segments back to the one building. You could also connect them like a Mesh, where each building is connected to each of the others. That would provide a good level of redundancy.

Is that what you mean?

Stefan

P.S. Digging up a road for 4-miles would be expensive. It would probably be a fibre connection although if you used a telco provider (e.g. BT) then it wouldn't be a single fibre cable from site-to-site. Effectively it would be fibre between exchanges (e.g. Site A - Exchange - Site B).

Also, depending on what network technology you use, there's a limit on the distance of a single cable segment e.g. 1000baseLX Gigabit Ethernet has a limit of 3km IIRC

For 4-miles, I'd be looking at an "extended LAN" or even leased line option from a telco provider.

For example, here I have a 2Mb leased line to a client 10-miles away and another 10Mb LAN-extension to another client. One is provided by BT, the other Telewest.

Stefan

Nice one thanks for your help!

Si

If its for you si a couple of paper cups and some string would do the trick, you knob head ;) :D:D:D

Gary