best way to connect 2 buildings

justsomebloke

Ok, I am looking to get a bit of inspiration here. So the story that leads to the question is. So currently the company I work for is techincally split into 3 different companies but all share the same building space and ICT infrastructure. However due to space constraints, a move of building is now on the cards, so up untill today it was a pretty straight ofrward switch with everyone moving over and just spread over 3 floors, however as of day some bright spark came up with the idea of 1 of the 3 companies staying in the current building and everyone else moving to another one. Now they still want to maintain as much of a shared ICT infrastructure as possible. i.e. phones and network access.

So my question is what would be the best way of connecting the 2 sites together. Now the building are probably only 120m apart however there will probably be another 2 building going in between the 2 sites and I am not sure of the height of these so line of site connections may be a non starter. Now we maybe able to lay a cable between the 2 however I wouldn't have a clue as to what would need to be put in place to do this plus if anything ever wwent wrong with the cable this route could end up being a nightmare.
So I was thinking maybe wireless but as it is roughly a 120m ditance with maybe 2 building in the way I am not sure if this is possible, so would anyone know if there would be a way to suitably strenghten the connection or if there is a standard that I would be able to use for this.
Due to the the cost restraints of a LL I am not to pushed about going that way (maybe a small one as a redundant connection but that would be all), Other then that I would be looking at maybe a Magnet or a metro broadband connection however as the bandwith on these may be limited I would need some sort of QOS on the connection however I am not sure if either of these would support this.

So I was just wondering if anybody had any other ideas that I may be able to use. So once again thanks in advance everyone

NutJob

Hava a look at irishwan.ie

arseagon

If you could lay cable in the proper Conduit then that's be what I'd do. Fibre lines between the buildings. If it's out of the question then a 5.8Ghz Wireless link would have plenty of throughput over 120m, it'd become a nightmare for you too if a building popped up in between and blocked your LoS.

nialler

As a short term solution a preN wireless solution may be your best bet (around 500mbits throughput) you'll need 2 stations to bridge and 120m isn't that much of a distance, LOS would be better but I believe the preN stuff is pretty resilient and depending on walls, girders etc you may not have a problem.

or

Get a wireless/wired broadband solution with plenty of UPLOAD (if Irish Broadband were reliable I'd recommned them) but once you've got a decent upload and you're not dealing with major filesizes then you VPN the two together and all clients should then have access to the infrastructure.

Capt'n Midnight

if you have money to burn laser will give tonnes of bandwidth, but if there is any way of running a trench use cable , safe more secure and more bandwidth - don't forget to run lots of extra cables copper is cheaper than labour.

also the phone systems and stuff might be run over copper - at an extreme example €40 will get you 305 m of cat5e each cable could take up to 4 2wire phones. - if only a few people remainng on site..

justsomebloke

hey thanks for the replies, at least now I have a couple more things I can look at:D

bushy...

If its a business and your using wireless you'd want something that either uses a proprietry protocol and is way up the frequency range .Using off the shelf consumer stuff that just sprays rf everywhere is a bad idea ( unless you want to help lads as much as possible in cracking your link ). You can get up to 10Gig with wireless if thats what you need.
If about 20Meg would do you, be about 220euro per end for ready to go units that do the proprietry protocol thing

_CreeD_

I'd go with Wireless bridging, do some research on the ideal APs and Antennas (Directional) for the distance/bandwidth you want and allow some overhead for the strongest encryption you can use. One nice little source is the Cisco Wifi Quick Reference, very concise and it covers this type of situation.

Sponge Bob

fibre is yer only man, armoured gigabit fibre is no problem and cheap. standard 1000base SX fibre is about €300 of gear each end in an ethernet switch and then use armoured fibre which can survive rough handling, costs about €10 a metre. Dig is the variable but a man with a digger for a day , eh .

1000base SX has a range of 500m and is what runs over those yellow fibre pairs between ethernet switches .

5.n Ghz wireless may suffer interference in a large city, Dublin is a mess of the things.

try make sure the fibre will be compatible with 10g ethernet in future so use 1300 nanometre single mode fibre 1300nm SM and you need only change the ends in the switches once its worth it financially