No Wires, No Worries: Bringing High-Speed Internet to a Remote Office
The situation
Our customer in this instance found themselves in a sticky predicament. The customer is on a rural block, and had recently converted an old shed into an office space. The shed was located reasonably close to other out buildings and within a reasonable distance to their main house. Unfortunately any modern office requires a functional internet connection and this is where we find our sticky predicament:
- The shed being of tin construction and insulated with a combination of bats and sarking effectively blocked phone and wifi signals from the near-by out buildings. It was a blackspot.
- The conduit to the shed (now office) doesn't run anywhere near network connectivity so there was no option to run fibre optic using what's already in place.
- The cost and complexity of cutting a trench between the shed and the nearest out-building was a non-starter, especially as it would mean cutting up part of the track around the property.
(above) A rough sketch of the situation. Power connected to the other side of the property. Reusing conduit wasn't an option.
To try and solve this, the customer installed a wifi mesh solution. It worked when it worked, but was unreliable with frequent drop outs in poor weather and speeds that were frustratingly unreliable.
The solution
Our proposed solution (and what was taken up by the customer) involved taking advantage of a few things working in our favour:
- The nearest out-building has a hard-wired gigabit network connection we could tap into.
- There was an existing post on the shed with accessible network point for a wireless link.
- The shed is limited by its internal 100Mbps network and the 100Mbps internet connection coming into the property.
(above) A view from the shed back to the main outbuilding
This gave us a clear path forward: a point-to-point wireless link using Ubiquiti NanoBeam AC Gen2 units.
The sentence above may sound like a made up language. What it means is that we set up a dedicated wireless bridge, like a focused beam of wifi, directly between two points.
This setup allowed us to meet the customer's needs:
- Reliable and stable internet connection.
- Cost-effective solution compared to trenching.
- Future-proofed for potential speed upgrades.
- Minimal disruption to the property.
For the technically minded out there, the specific hardware choice for this installation while not bleeding edge is a perfect fit for the environment:
- The NanoBeams are very cost-effective even compared to other point-to-point hardware.
- The 100Mbps limit gives us tons of headroom (i.e. the network is enforcing a bandwidth limit well before we hit any limitations imposed by the NanoBeams).
- The NanoBeams are good for connections over a few KMs with clear line of sight, at just 25 meters, the distance was well within the NanoBeam's capabilities, offering exceptional signal strength.
(above) As part of our installs we take extensive drone imagery (where legally permitted to do so). It helps us to understand the environment, but also makes it easier to visualise the solution for customers or a blog post.
Time taken to fine tune the alignment on the two NanoBeams and we have an incredibly strong signal. Should the customer ever upgrade the shed/office network to gigabit, they should have a good 400Mbps back to the rest of the network, plenty of headroom for some incremental Internet speed upgrades, but will require replacing the NanoBeams should gigabit or higher speeds become a necessity. We discussed this with the customer, their primary use case is email and printing and that's not expected to change so we're confident this will work for years to come.
(above) View from the out-building back to the shed/office.
With everything installed we've been able to reliably hit 100Mbps in both directions over the wireless link, with the shed's internal 100Mbps network acting as the limit on maximum bandwidth.
A big thank you to our customer for permitting us to use images of their install for this post.
Remember, if your rural or campus Wi-Fi is harming your business, you can always reach out to AFSecure for help.