A new client on an industrial site posed us a problem – connecting buildings. They are moving from their current workshop to another building at an adjacent address. They also have an office that is only connected by 4G since NBN can’t find them… Also 2 connections – one for voice and one for data. They currently have 2 x wireless bridges from the office to the current workshop – an older one for Internet and a newer one for security cameras. FTTP NBN is available in the new workshop building.
Now you have the outline, here’s what we came up with:
The office is at point 1 – approx 154 metres from the new workshop at the bottom – and the existing workshop at point 2 – approx 112 metres from the new workshop. The equipment chosen is somewhat of an overkill for the distance but for capacity and with the ever increasing congestion on existing Wi-Fi bands I decided to use the 60 GHz band. Ubiquiti has a range of reasonably priced 60 GHz equipment. On the main building with the NBN I selected a Wave Micro since it has a 90 degree sector antenna and Wave Pico units at the other end that have a much narrower beam. The stated range for this combination is around 900 metres so we are well within its capabilities for maximum throughput. As expected, the links have come up to 100% capacity and are providing speeds in excess of 1 Gbps so there is more than enough capacity for voice, data and security cameras. These units also have a backup 5GHz radio in them to fall back to in the case of extreme attenuation from heavy rain.
Having got everything connected externally, internally we have used Ubiquiti equipment as well.
This is not something we do often but we certainly have the capability to design and implement a solution. The next step is to migrate off the NEC SL2100 phone system to something in the cloud but it is working fine for the moment. The main requirement was inter-building connectivity.
Contact us if you want to pose us a problem on connecting buildings. We thrive on challenges like this.
