Directional building to building Wifi

[gizard]

Hi All,

I am trying to get a decent broadband connection for my parents. they currently have only about 0.25 meg ! which is draconian considering less than half a mile a way BT infinity is available - however for reasons not exactly known they will not upgrade / add the fibre cabinet in my parents street.

The only other option open to them is a microwave link to Portsmouth (they live on the Isle of Wight). However I am not convinced this is a good idea because of the volume of shipping that goes up and down the Solent and their house is almost at sea level.

So I have BT infinity at a property that is approximately 300 - 350 meters as the crow flies from their house which I believe has line of sight (I need to confirm this and understand that it will make a difference).

My question is what sort of speed over 2.4ghz wifi will I get with directional wifi in line of sight with something like the following and would I need any form of booster or will a couple of standard wifi APs be good enough (Draytek Vigor AP 700):

http://www.wifi-antennas.co.uk/antennas/18dbi-2-4g...

What sort of speed would I expect to get (it would need to be 10MB plus in order for it to be worth while

I was thinking of them keeping their existing broadband (lets call it narrowband!) and using an old 2820 draytek router which has a secondary internet port for load balancing etc with the wifi AP link connected to the secondary WAN port.....

[andy-xr]

They not using Wightfibre? Thought they had everything on the island sorted out?

[gizard]

andy-xr said:

They not using Wightfibre? Thought they had everything on the island sorted out?

Ha ha far from it, the microwave link is an offering from Wightfibre but as mentioned it is / will be susceptible to ships blocking the signal on a regular basis...

[andy-xr]

They're doing backhaul for a lot of carriers to get on to IoW, so I'd be surprised if they punted out a domestic service that was so different from the commercial, which has a tight SLA. Unless they've said it's crap of course!

[gizard]

Well my parents neighbour has 'wightfibre wireless' and says that every time a ship goes past it gets disrupted.... plus I am not sure but wouldn't the link also be disrupted by trees? There are trees on their sea wall which will probably be in the line of sight of the microwave link and they will not want to cut down or back the trees....

[andy-xr]

Gotcha, seems odd - I'd have thought they'd be using 5 and 18Ghz rather than 2.4 tbh, but you know more than I do!

[megaphone]

You need a WiFi bridge, or PtP link (point to point). Ubiquiti kit is good, look at using two Nanostation M5 or Loco5.

http://www.ubnt.com/airmax#nanostationm

These work on 5Ghz frequency, set one up on your house, as high as possible, and the receiver up on you parents house, again as high as possible. Cable to their own local router. Will easily cover 300m, I have them working over 1Km without any issues.

Up to 300mb through-put, so easily enough for Infinity and more.

Edited by megaphone on Wednesday 2nd July 11:42

[gizard]

andy-xr said:

Gotcha, seems odd - I'd have thought they'd be using 5 and 18Ghz rather than 2.4 tbh, but you know more than I do!

ah no you miss understand me - I've no clue about the microwave link or whatever Wightfibre provide to link to Portsmouth. I am proposing to do a standard wifi link over 350 odd metres to a property that does have a BT infinity broadband hence my question in the first post about what sort of speed I should expect to get using the linked antenna?

[mosstrooper]

I have been using a Yagi TurboTenna with a booster kit for a couple of years now.

Picks up a BT WiFi signal from a building just under 1 mile away. Open country, line of site. So, if you have a BT account name and password the connection is free.

Current speed 5.5 Mbps.

Signal strength can vary and sometimes drops (particularly in the afternoon, for some reason).

I sometimes point it in another direction where there are some nearer houses but the signal is more intermittent due, I think, to traffic. Interestingly it sometimes picks up a signal from a passing Stagecoach bus !

The booster kit certainly made a difference.

[dtmpower]

Before my sister was able to get broadband in the area, we setup a wireless bridge using WRT-54G routers in AP-Bridge mode using the 3rd party firmware dd-wrt.

This allows you to set the static channel and power output (above the legal limit)

We were able to setup a LAN bridge (both locations in the same subnet using my home router as the gateway/DNS/DHCP ) with two directional antenna.

Both APs were in the loft space of each property and the antenna on the roof with the tv aerial.

It worked fine for the ~100m distance with the firmware set to limit to 1mb connection , anything higher and it was ramping up and down and thus dropping some packets.

Have you got line of sight between both properties ?

[theboss]

I don't have specific details of the kit but I have a directional 5Ghz antenna on a pole above my roof, which links to an ISP transmitter on a phone mast about 1.5 miles away (direct line of sight). I get about 30Mbps in each direction. I believe clear line of sight between the two radios is crucial for this sort of deployment - it took the guys a while of fiddling (and several masts of varying length attached to the roof) to achieve this.

Its fairly stable, latency is low, the only issues have been sporadic packet loss during strong winds...

[TheExcession]

megaphone said:

You need a WiFi bridge, or PtP link (point to point). Ubiquiti kit is good, look at using two Nanostation M5 or Loco5.

http://www.ubnt.com/airmax#nanostationm

These work on 5Ghz frequency, set one up on your house, as high as possible, and the receiver up on you parents house, again as high as possible. Cable to their own local router. Will easily cover 300m, I have them working over 1Km without any issues.

Up to 300mb through-put, so easily enough for Infinity and more.

Edited by megaphone on Wednesday 2nd July 11:42

Just to throw another penny in the mix the NanoBeams are I think a better choice than opting for the NanoStations for PTP links (bit cheaper too).

Ubiquiti kit for us seems rock solid, we have a 16km PTP link running using their Rocket stuff. It's been in place for nearly 2 years now, the only time we've revisited it was last week just for a look-and-see. All that I did was wipe away the green stuff growing on the dish.

As said go with the 5GHz stuff and use the tighter beam antennas, they're trickier to align but it stops you bleeding over everyone else and subsequently keeps the noise off your link.

[TheExcession]

And to answer the OP

gizard said:

However I am not convinced this is a good idea because of the volume of shipping that goes up and down the Solent and their house is almost at sea level.

I seriously doubt the shipping is an issue here, but you are correct, a PTP link to the mainland is probably over kill given that

gizard said:

So I have BT infinity at a property that is approximately 300 - 350 meters as the crow flies from their house which I believe has line of sight (I need to confirm this and understand that it will make a difference).

Line of sight it crucial in any WiFi link and for 300 metres just moving to the other end of a building can make a massive difference (i.e. bypass a tree)

gizard said:

My question is what sort of speed over 2.4ghz wifi will I get with directional wifi in line of sight with something like the following and would I need any form of booster or will a couple of standard wifi APs be good enough (Draytek Vigor AP 700):

http://www.wifi-antennas.co.uk/antennas/18dbi-2-4g...

What sort of speed would I expect to get (it would need to be 10MB plus in order for it to be worth while

That's insane money for a Yagi antenna, try looking at Solwise.

Your biggest problem might be being able to tap-in an antenna to the back of the router. It could involve making up your own cables etc.

Unless you are a hobby/DIY wanna do it for kudos type, I'd suggest you buy a couple of suitable Ubiquiti radios, but don't forget to factor in the cost of brackets and cabling.

[arcturus]

Just use Ubiquiti kit. It is what it is built for. As a previous poster said, get 2 of these. One at each end, job done, no messing around and it will work (provided you have LOS). We use them regularly for linking buildings.

[arcturus]

And here is a link to a suitable wall bracket on the same website in case you don't have a handy TV aerial pole to mount the radio on.

You just need to sort the CAT5e cable out but I don't know what lengths you need at each end but MS Distribution sell that as well.

[gpo746]

run a cable across road be fine

[gizard]

arcturus said:

Just use Ubiquiti kit. It is what it is built for. As a previous poster said, get 2 of these. One at each end, job done, no messing around and it will work (provided you have LOS). We use them regularly for linking buildings.

Thanks all for the replies most helpful. It looks like the above would be the best option 100 quid would be reasonable. I can do the cables easily (I have structured cabled my own house through out!) The tricky bit will be getting on the roof of both houses and then aiming the two... Still I need to confirm that los is actually available - I strongly suspect that chimney stack to chimney stack is los but I am not on the island ATM so cannot confirm...

Cheers G.

[gizard]

Hi All,

Right I have investigated the site in more detail and the distance is 310 meters give or take a few and there is good line of site. the only problem might be that they are at different altitudes so the antennas I assume will need to be angled on two planes horizontal and vertical.

I am wondering which is the best to go for:

https://www.msdist.co.uk/product_Ubiquiti-NanoStat...
84.88 inc Vat per unit


https://www.msdist.co.uk/product_LOCOM5.php
65.48 inc VAT

the difference being the speed I guess - bearing in mind that the internet speed is currently 30 meg infinity but would be capable of the full 70 meg if I upgrade it....

[gizard]

here is a picture taken from an upstairs window of the property that has the decent broadband. circled is the chimney stack I am hopping to mount a receiving wifi link - as mentioned the distance is about 310m and as it's the height of summer there don't appear to be any trees anywhere near the LOS.

[gizard]

oh I should add that I am proposing to mount the antenna on the sending property a little higher than the point the picture was taken, so given the angle there will be even more clearance and better LOS.