HELP! Farmer trying to set-up long-range property WiFi

[degrub]

TDMA = time division multiplexing, each channel/client gets a time slice "guaranteed" in the link bandwidth.

Transfer between any two ports on the switch will be at line speed - e.g. 1Gb/s. The port that connects to the router connecting to the modem (ATT) would have to handle all 8-11 video feeds at one time (roughly) . Not an issue for Gbit ethernet. The 10Mb/s cell upload bandwidth will throttle the combined feed. The switch and the router have very limited buffering capability. Packets will be lost, video frames dropped, unusable. Maybe you could stream 2-3 cameras. The video would need to be highly compressed to fit within the available bandwidth, say a 100- 400Mbit/s stream for each.

i would ask ATT what they can guarantee for their upload bandwidth on a sustained, continuous basis to confirm the 10 Mbit/s. You may have to talk with level 2 or 3 tech support or engineering.

So one way to solve your upload bandwidth issue is to have a local recorder storing x days of video. Locate this on the ethernet before you go to the modem - on a port of the top level switch. When you dial in to see video, you are looking at any one of the video feeds recorded and maybe one or two live streams. All of your local networking (ethernet cabled) should be 1 Gb/s. Your individual video camera feeds will be however fast the environment allows the wireless signal to transfer between the camera and the switch.
More point to point wireless might be needed depending on environment and resulting transfer rates. Each time you go through a repeater, you loose 50% + overheads of available bandwidth if the point to point radio is not dedicated to that function.

If you happen to be close enough to a microwave station tower , you might be able to use that instead of cell for the upload. i believe that would be through the commercial rather than residential service group.

 

[Tech9]

Thoughts?

I can only try one more time to save you money at this point because the whole idea is at the very edge of Wi-Fi technical limitations, your Internet bandwidth is clearly not enough for intended use and the imagined system has enormous amount of different failure points. Even after thousands of dollars invested in generators, solar panels, inverters, surge arrestors, batteries, mounting poles, switches, wireless bridges, access points, cameras, etc. and weeks in trying to make it work this thing is highly unlikely to work reliably if at all. And the main reason this conversation is going in circles is this:

I have no idea how this works.

 

[le_berger_des_photons]

Hello farmer,

your 35 acres no doubt is divided into fields. Do you have barbed wire fences running along wood posts? If you do, none of these distances are too long for doing it all with ethernet and not needing any solar power, not needing any wifi. You can use 802.11at, you can go 305 feet between pairs of devices. You can have cheap switches that would enable you to go 5 X 305 feet off of the one 54 volt power supply. It wouldn't cost much to put those ethernet cables inside of irl tubes on your fences. Speaking from experience, that will last many years with no maintenance. This should permit gigabt speeds to everywhere. Your biggest problem will be storms, but in spite of the folks wisdom of "lightning never strikes twice" which is totally wrong, the lightning always keeps striking in the same place. If you're not in a place like that you'll be fine. It might be cheaper in some cases to use 1.5 mm2 electrical cables and home networking devices. If you don't have fences, and if you don't till this soil, you can easily dig tiny trenches with just a piece of steel behind your tractor set to drag through the earth maybe 4 inches down. I did that (thanks to an innovative farmer) almost twenty years ago over a distance of 1000 feet. We buried a 1.5 mm three conductor electrical cable and have never had a problem since. He has sheep, so no tilling.

I don't know the name of these tubes to protect the cable in english. Here's an image of them: https://www.manomano.fr/p/tube-irl-tulipe-16-2m-gris-44103342

In twenty years the circuit breaker has gone off maybe 10 times. It's up at the top of a cliff. At first I lost a few radios which were on the ends of 100 foot ethernet cables right on the cliff. I understood that there I'd use a pair of radios instead of a 100 foot cable. I also learned that 50 feet away from that cliff I could use long cables and have never lost a device. The lightning falls at the top of the cliff every time, never further up.

I've been doing this sort of job for 20 years, and I"m as cheap as Jack Benny. So, looking forward to talking to you about it.