Shared internet - 2 buildings
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Anonymous
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Can anyone help someone low tech figure out how to have internet in two buildings that are 50-70 feet apart? Like a main house and shed converted to an office.
The main house has Internet and a so-so much system (mesh force). It feels like if the little mesh hubs are more than about 8 feet apart they don’t work properly, so i don’t see how it would work across a bigger gap? Or could it? I could possibly get the gap between hubs down to about 15 feet by putting units int eh garage, but it seems like that would lead to really unreliable internet in the shed, right? |
Anonymous
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Trying to span buildings and 70 feet with a pure wireless solution is going to give you crappy results. The standard thing to do is to run ethernet cable (I would suggest cat6 but you can go with cat5e) from your router through your house to the shed. To cover the outside portion you will need outdoor rated cable and will probably want to dig a trench and bury conduit. Depending on the layout of your house, running cable might involve cutting holes in your walls and patching them.
Another other option is to just run the cable through the house to the garage and then add an wireless access point to span the 15 feet. Ideally, you would use an indoor/outdoor model AP (e.g., https://www.ui.com/unifi/unifi-ap-outdoor/) and mount it on the outside of the garage. This saves digging up whatever is between the garage and shed and is probably preferable if there is a driveway involved. A third option is to see if you can move your router to a better location, but the distances are probably all too long for a pure wireless solution. You could also contact your ISP (e.g., verizon or comcast) about getting a dedicated line run out to the shed. This will introduce networking issues if you want to, for example, share a printer. |
Anonymous
| Thank you! I was trying to avoid calling my cable provider, but i think that’s probably my best bet... |
Anonymous
No, it is really not your best bet. The best bet is to run the cat6 cable and do it right. Your cable provider is just going to staple the cable/fiber to the baseboard and not really care how it looks. Even if they pull a cable from the poll, and I am not sure they will, you would be better off hanging/burying the cable yourself. |
Anonymous
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Do your two buildings share a common breaker panel? You might be able to use an extended that runs over the power lines.
https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-powerline-networking-kit/ I have never used one since I used to work in the field and fishing/terminating cable was just a part of the job. |
Anonymous
| PP - i have no idea if they share a breaker panel - I’ll have to go look. Thanks for the recommendation though - that might help inside the house too! |
Anonymous
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Another vote for trench.
I bought 150 feet of Outdoor Ethernet Cable and then using my edger made a small trench in the yard and buried it in there. Outdoor cable has better shielding to prevent against weather. I guess you could run it in the air, like 8 feet high if you wanted, but you'd see it and birds might land on it. https://amzn.to/38NKvWN |
Anonymous
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Don't do buried ethernet cable. If you get a lightning strike, all of your equipment will be fried in short order. There are also some possible grounding issues with this approach.
The safe way to do this is with direct burial fiber, with copper-to-fiber media converters on each side. With the direct-burial cable, you don't need conduit, but you should do two cable runs in case anything happens to one of them. It's not that expensive in the lengths that you are discussing. Get cable with pre-terminated ends, since fiber termination requires special equipment and skills. Unlike cat. 5e/6/6a, you can legally run fiber in the same conduit as power cables, since the fiber isn't actually conductive. That might make things easier if you already have installed conduit. |
Anonymous
| PP here. I should add that there are point-to--point microwave systems that exist, but fiber makes more sense for this short of a distance. If you were talking about going hundreds of feet in a line-of-sight direction, microwave might be a good option. |
Anonymous
| Ubiquiti has some really good point to point wireless that will work, but best results would come from burying fiber. |