Quick advice ~30m wireless link

[roosauce]

Hi Guys,

Thanks in advance for this - seems like there's a lot of good help / information on this forum!

I've been digging around for information on a setup for a new house. The main challenge is pushing maximum data - certainly 200Mbit+, but much more is much better - across 25-30m.

I've attached a very rough diagram of the house. The Virgin 150Mbit cable modem will be at the front of the house, and several bandwidth-hungry man-cave components in a shed at the back of the garden ~25-30m away.

There are a couple of tricks / comments:
1. I need to not deploy routers that my wife would deem as ugly in the front room, or I need to hide them somehow
2. I can't run obvious cables through the house (for now)
3. I can't modify the downstairs much at the moment (e.g. re-wire behind walls)
4. The main objective is drawing Internet to the man-cave, but there may be some streaming from a NAS back to the house
5. I have flexibility in the man-cave/shed i.e. I could set up a more 'ugly' but functional router on the wall or some such. I think that I can just about create line-of-site (through 2 glass doors/windows), so that's positive
6. There is mains electricity connection through to the shed, but it does move through fuses. I believe that might cause issues for powerline adapters?
7. I have a pretty solid budget without going to enterprise craziness
8. Minimizing overall latency would be ideal as I like to game

I'm quite familiar with networking but haven't done much with high-bandwidth wireless over longer distances.

My best idea for now is to revert the Virgin super router to modem-only (hidden) and wire that to a more aesthetically pleasing 5th gen Apple AirPort Extreme AC in the front room so I can get LOS w/ beamforming. In the shed / man-cave I'm considering another AirPort Extreme simply for compatibility reasons, but am debating an Asus router with better network management tools and perhaps a directional antenna setup in an attempt to increase the overall gain & stability. I'm not sure of the nuances there.

Any guidance would be appreciated ... I need to live wireless for at least a couple of years and am used to wiring everything!

Thanks ...

 

[thiggins]

As long as everything is on the same side of a mains transformer, powerline should work. Fuses don't matter.

I would try a pair of HomePlug AV2 MIMO adapters before messing with wireless. Check the Powerline Ranker.

You're only going to be able to approach a 200 Mbps link with 802.11ac and a strong signal. But the 5 GHz signal will lose strength quickly, so it's doubtful you'll get reliable, solid 200 Mbps.

I'd run an Ethernet cable around the OUTSIDE of the house, then bury it for the short distance through the garden.

 

[stevech]

Can you get a buryable cat5 cable to outside of house? Rent a "sod slitter" machine - slit the sod / soil, insert buryable cat5.

I did this recently - about 20m. I did it by soaking the route well with water. Then a f-l-a-t bladed shovel to slit instead of a machine.

Cable went out of vent hole in garage, down the slit to the other building. I had to go under two sidewalks - and this was easy - with a 1 inch diameter garden auger and long shank in an ordinary 1/2 in. drill motor. That took only about 15 minutes, small amount of digging. Slitting took about an hour. I went deep enough to avoid the gardener's aerator machine's reach.

I did this for RG6 coax for the main feed to the house for cable modem, phone, TV. Because the builder-installed RG59 was 100 ft. long and damaged where I could not repair or replace.
But cat5 would be the same process.

Alternative is a pair of outdoor bridges shown below, mounted at eaves height. Power line IP is quite if'y but might work - or won't work later when something changes. I've used them.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...&cm_re=engenius_bridge-_-33-168-116-_-Product

If there's existing TV coax in the man-cave room, you can use MoCA modems. Easy.

 

[roosauce]

Thanks a lot for the responses guys. I've read up on the powerline and bridge options you've outlined - looks like best case would be around 100Mbps (although there might be better outdoor bridges - I'll look).

No TV coax unfortunately, so it sounds like I need to get creative with a cable drop. It's a mid-terrace (i.e. there are adjoining houses either side) so I can't go around the house. I might be able to push a cable out the front then over the roof through to a buried channel in the garden. Sounds like a challenge

 

[roosauce]

Ah, the sun's shining I double-checked over at the house and it looks like someone has dropped some coax over to the rear of the house! I guess it's likely that I can set up the modem in the man cave and push a lower speed back to the house via 2.4g or a powerline + wifi setup. Nice!

 

[System Error Message]

sure wifi rates can go up to 1 Gb/s but you'll only get to use up to 60% on best case scenario when you're a few feet from the router. The 100Mb/s wire link would be a lot more reliable over longer distances and through walls compared to wifi.

 

[azazel1024]

Looking at the house diagram, I am thinking older brick row home? If so, you are going to get poor wifi penetration. My advice is to setup the modem in the house itself, have wifi in the house itself and then run a MoCA bridge to run the network out to the man cave over the coax and setup a wifi router in access point mode in the man cave with the radio power set to minimum.

That'll give your best overall performance. Otherwise I think you'll find poor wifi performance in most of the house if trying to provide it form the shed and vice versa. Powerline over that distance is likely to be poor. Even with directional antennas if you have to punch it through the house, you are unlikely to get anywhere close to the 200Mbps performance you'd like (maybe more like 50Mbps, with directional antennas, a lot worse without).

With MoCA you'll likely at least get 80-90Mbps, which is likely to be better than Powerline and certainly better than wifi at those distances.

 

[roosauce]

Yes, it's a London house built a bit after the 1st world war and there are bricks everywhere!

I'll look into MoCA bridges. I presume they would need to run on a separate part of the coax cabling so that they wouldn't interfere with the inbound virgin cable broadband? I'm still trying to work out where the cables run from and to, and have mainly worked with ADSL lines previously. Looks like that cabling work was done some time back and it runs under floors in some cases so I can't see it well.

There seems to be a cable hub of some description (virgin branded) on the front outside of the house, and this links into the main front room and separately over to a bedroom with a link through to the back of the house. The MoCA bridge might therefore need to transition back up the internet-providing cable to the hub then over to the man cave, if I did it from the main front room.

Maybe I can bring the internet to the man-cave then use a MoCA bridge to bring internet to the bedroom upstairs (over an unused cable link), and wifi from there for the main house ... the main house just needs about 30mbps of internet for some family streaming & browsing. Maybe pushing the main house down to a 2.4GHz frequency could penetrate the brickwork a bit better.

 

[azazel1024]

Nope, it can coexist. The frequencies used for cable internet are different than those used for MoCA. At worst you'd place a MoCA filter on the coax between the portion of the network that the MoCA bridges are on and the rest of the network. They do not need to be on their own coax.

 

[stevech]

example MoCA 1.0 Net yield (not raw rate) 70Mbps + (Mbps = Megabits/sec).
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B008EQ4BQG/?tag=snbforums-20

new MoCA 2.0, 2X price, 2-3 time speed. Very new.
ActionTech is just beginning to ship. Bleeding edge.

 

[roosauce]

Awesome - thanks for the tips! I will dig further into MoCA, but it sounds like this is the best solution for the primary transition link given the expected reliability. I'd originally thought that no wired connection would be possible.

I'm sure I'll experiment a bit with the wireless and powerline links as well. I'd be interested in seeing the differences and ... it'll be fun

 

[azazel1024]

See if you can find a couple of used Actiontec EC2500 MoCA bridges. I have one running in my house to bridge my DVR to my network since it doesn't have a (working) Ethernet port to get guide data and VOD. It works well. I think I picked it up for $38 US shipped about a year ago. I've seen a pair (generally how they are sold) on eBay for around $75 US or so.

 

[roosauce]

Sounds good, I'll look into it.