At work we have two facilities located across a parking lot. Currently we have some crap wireless solution that is horrendously slow to handle connecting the “remote” site to the server which is based in the main building.
We’ve contacted vendors about tunneling some cable but they keep wanting to push more wireless options. This is their current recommendation:
I don’t think I’ll be able to answer, but here is a relevant question?
What is the type of traffic and how many users? Is it ONLY the 10 users you mentioned and are they only transferring 5-10MB files? How frequently is it being used? Are they also using email/web browsers/other network services?
If the building is just across the parking lot, I’d say get a buried fiber run or have the ISP do Metro Ethernet or Dark Fiber, though for being across the parking lot that is rather excessive. Wireless really is a shitty option especially if you have a decent amount of people operating on it and you are going to put heavy traffic on it.
If you start factoring in things like Windows File Sharing, VDI/Citrix, VOIP Phones wireless just wouldn’t be able to keep up.
This seems like such a minor expense for a business to have a contractor come in with a saw and cut a line in the parking lot, drop some fiber in there, and seal the cut back up. All the bandwidth you’ll ever need and you can stop wasting man hours of high dollar engineers who sit and wait while files open.
You’re going to be connecting at half duplex with wireless, even with gods boner radiating the wireless signal, nothing like CAD files should be transferred over wireless. Believe me, do it right the first time rather than wasting money to bandaid a situation.
If I were the OP, I would ask the the vendor for references to other companies that may have installed this technology. I’ve worked with enough vendor installed systems to know that shiny sales pitches are often not realized when a product is installed. I don’t know if it’s possible to get a contact to another customer as a reference, but it may be worth a shot.
Just a guess, but maybe the vendors you’re dealing with are pushing the fancy point to point wifi because they get to sell you a bunch of expensive equipment, contract to install it, then contract to keep it running. Compared to selling you X feet of fiber and having to a contractor cut and fix your parking lot I’m guessing the former has a whole lot more profit for them.
It’s also a giant cluster fuck depending on who owns the parking lot and if you want to go aerial with it you need to get permission to use poles and all this bs.
However if the same company owns both buildings etc I would still go the fiber route being able to go 1Gb -> 40Gb -> 100Gb with single mode fiber would be a lot more useful then any 100Mb wireless solution.
Add up what it costs to have engineers you’re paying big bucks to sit around for 5+ minutes every time they open a file, 5 days a week, 52 weeks a year vs a one time cost of paying some paving company to rip and repair a 3" wide trench in a parking lot. Fiber doesn’t have to be buried deep, especially down south where he is.
If you have a line of sight, you can simply buy two Wireless N access points and make a 100MB link straight across the parking lot that can equal the same speed as running a Ethernet cable. Cisco has aim-able antennas that are perfect for this and actually have covered a steel mill before using this solution.