So I’ve got a friend of mine who has a farm, he’s got an outbuilding that he’d like to connect to the internet. I paced it out and it’s at least 125m from his house. I think he’s got some farm machinery that needs to connect to the internet and the mobile reception is rubbish, bad enough for phone calls!
I’ve read that CAT cable has a 100m limit before things start getting forgotten or lost, so are there any other alternatives? I’m sure an engineer might be able to boost the signal over a CAT cable, but is fibre even a possibility or just ridiculously expensive?
This isn’t something I would do for him, just curious really.
If you go with wifi, I agree with @mutation666 and do a Ubiquiti point to point wireless bridge. Not sure what type of bandwidth the machines need but I can’t really expect to exceed 802.11ac’s capacity.
If you need high speed / low latency to the barn, I’d go with some type of cabling. If you have a PoE switch, I would consider getting a PoE gigabit extender for the run. They have outdoor rated ones for about 100 USD.
I purchased a pair of Ubiquiti AirMAX Nanobeam AC Gen2 and set up a point-to-point link between two buildings 270m apart earlier this week. Got 70Mbps through a few trees, one steel fence and clipping the corner of a third building. Lots of potential to improve on that by tweaking the placement of both units, but it’s perfectly adequate for current needs.
Theoretical maximum speed is ~450Mbps.
Theoretical maximum range is ~15km.
You could also get a cheap ghetto singlemode lc-lc fiber and a pair of chinese gigabit media converters for about the same price… could upgrade to 10/40 Gbps at some point.
Thank you for that, I’m not going to ask him what bandwidth / latency he needs, as he probably doesn’t have a clue, so I’ll go over there soon and do some tests. Do you think that PoE would get that far? Thanks!
I quit doing IT work ages ago, but it seems your options for doing long hauls are a lot better these days. When I first started pretty much your only option was coaxial cable. With point to point wireless (someone else can chime in if it’s changed over the years) you’ll want to mount the two antennas as high as you can, as any heavy equipment like trucks, tractors, etc that get parked in between have the potential to effect the connection.
It might go without saying to some but if you do decide to bury copper or fiber make sure you bury it deep enough, and preferably in a conduit if this connection is at all mission critical (at least in the sense that it’s going to cost him money when it goes down). Don’t pull a Google and bury your fiber just a few inches deep to save time/money. This is especially true if this is an unfinished yard/road that could get rutted up during the rains and such. /shrug. Again I’m probably saying the obvious here, but I had to deal with backhoed runs, and asphalt left to deteriorate until the conduit beneath got crushed (though it probably had more to do with the 10’s of thousands of pounds they were running over top of it).
Cheers for chiming in Novastark, yes I’m glad it’s something he wants now than 10-15 years ago! Fortunately the buildings are pretty tall so it could go on the gable under the ridge, so that could keep it far from vehicles and obstructions. He’s also lucky there are no trees in the way…if that could be an issue!
Ha! Did Google really do that? Blimey, even for my own little run of about 30 metres, I was going to bury it at least 300-400mm deep! Luckily in the farmers situation there are’s no hardstanding between the buildings, it’s just rough pasture. Conduit is a definite though for sure.
This is especially true if this is an unfinished yard/road that could get rutted up during the rains and such. /shrug. Again I’m probably saying the obvious here, but I had to deal with backhoed runs, and asphalt left to deteriorate until the conduit beneath got crushed (though it probably had more to do with the 10’s of thousands of pounds they were running over top of it).