I am new to Wireless itself and I have 3 buildings that need to be connected together. 2 of the 3 are direct line of sight (across the street from each other), however, the 3rd building is located about 2 miles away. We have access to use local Celular Towers to place our equipment on to connect building 3. My question is how would I go about doing that? Do I need a computer or something at the tower? Any special antennas for celular towers? Like I said, I am a newbie at Wireless. Any help would be great. Thanks.
Tek-Tips is the largest IT community on the Internet today!
Members share and learn making Tek-Tips Forums the best source of peer-reviewed technical information on the Internet!
-
Congratulations wOOdy-Soft on being selected by the Tek-Tips community for having the most helpful posts in the forums last week. Way to Go!
Newbie Wireless guy seeks help
- Thread starter negley97
- Start date
First of all you need to make sure point A (building 1 or 2) has line-of-sight to the cellular tower (point B). Secondly you need to make sure point C (building 3) also has line-of-sight.
Next, it all depends on how much bandwidth you need to push. If you're happy with 11mb asycronous 802.11b devices could be fine...if you're worried about security maybe not...but you could encrypted VPN the link to help protect from on-lookers...
Decide on a product (ie Agere Systems ...Orinoco) and install equipment...Instead of using the Accesspoint offered by Agere we've built an access point using FreeBSD and Orinoco Silver cards...
No special antennas needed for the cellular towers...make sure you have some place on the tower (or building top) to put your dish antennas, some cellular towers are poles which make your life much more difficult and tower space becomes a premium...look for LOS from the rooftop of the equipment room.
tedees
Next, it all depends on how much bandwidth you need to push. If you're happy with 11mb asycronous 802.11b devices could be fine...if you're worried about security maybe not...but you could encrypted VPN the link to help protect from on-lookers...
Decide on a product (ie Agere Systems ...Orinoco) and install equipment...Instead of using the Accesspoint offered by Agere we've built an access point using FreeBSD and Orinoco Silver cards...
No special antennas needed for the cellular towers...make sure you have some place on the tower (or building top) to put your dish antennas, some cellular towers are poles which make your life much more difficult and tower space becomes a premium...look for LOS from the rooftop of the equipment room.
tedees
I did a set up similar to this using the Tsunami by Western Multiplex. It is not 802.11 format. This is different. Go to and look at the Tsunami. Proxim and Western Merged.
Basically this is what you can expect. Get a couple antenna's, a couple wireless bridges, and away you go. There is more details of course. I would use have the two buildings in line of sight set up in the normal building to building connection. For the one you can't see, you will have to put a middle antenna between on the tower to relay communications.
Take care
Audra
Basically this is what you can expect. Get a couple antenna's, a couple wireless bridges, and away you go. There is more details of course. I would use have the two buildings in line of sight set up in the normal building to building connection. For the one you can't see, you will have to put a middle antenna between on the tower to relay communications.
Take care
Audra
If you plan to mount your antennas on a co-location with celluar, get a site survey done FIRST to make sure that the cellular will not *bleed over* into your 2.4 Ghz band to make it useless. They (cellular) put out alot more power then you can on 802.11b at 2.4Ghz and even though they are very different frequencies, there is a normally amount of harmonics and noise. With enough power, that noise can kill your link.
If that works, then consider this.
80211b is cheap and plentiful. Security sucks unless you encrypt using IPSEC, VPN and so on. There are newer methods coming out from vendors like Cisco that will just be a flash upgrade but heads and shoulders abopve today's WEP. Always use the 128 bit WEP.. if nothing else.
802.11a is the newest with roughly 50Mbps (30 usable). It's not as cheap and the ranges then to be shorter since it's a high band ( 5Ghz)
VEndor specific solutions are NOT recommended since vendors go away, support solutions like Airmagnet/NAI Sniffer do not suport them and so on. Wireless is in too much of a flux right now to use something that is vendor specific and hope to support in just 2 years or less.
I have this info and more on one of my pages..
MikeS
Find me at
"Take advantage of the enemy's unreadiness, make your way by unexpected routes, and attack unguarded spots."
Sun Tzu
If that works, then consider this.
80211b is cheap and plentiful. Security sucks unless you encrypt using IPSEC, VPN and so on. There are newer methods coming out from vendors like Cisco that will just be a flash upgrade but heads and shoulders abopve today's WEP. Always use the 128 bit WEP.. if nothing else.
802.11a is the newest with roughly 50Mbps (30 usable). It's not as cheap and the ranges then to be shorter since it's a high band ( 5Ghz)
VEndor specific solutions are NOT recommended since vendors go away, support solutions like Airmagnet/NAI Sniffer do not suport them and so on. Wireless is in too much of a flux right now to use something that is vendor specific and hope to support in just 2 years or less.
I have this info and more on one of my pages..
MikeS
Find me at
"Take advantage of the enemy's unreadiness, make your way by unexpected routes, and attack unguarded spots."
Sun Tzu
- Status
Similar threads
- Locked
- Question
- Locked
- Question