What equipment do I need to share bb between two houses.

clearz

Hey,

My parents and I live next door to one another. Currently we share one broadband connection, a 70mb FTTC connection which comes into their house and connects at the full 70mb. Our current topology is set up like the following. They have the standard Hauwei Vodafone VDSL box to which the incoming line is connected. I have the old ADSL Hauwei box in my house. I have installed OpenWRT on this which connects to the box in my parents house as a client and rebroadcasts the signal. I also use power line network adapters in my house to connect to this router. All WiFi connections are 802.11n. The following are the speeds we get.

1) Parents house connected directly to the VDSL router can expect 8 MB/s DL
2) My house connected using Ethernet over power I get 1.5 MB/s DL
3) Using WiFi in my house to connect to the OpenWRT router ~1 MB/s DL

I have considered bringing a Cat cable between the two houses. I want to be able to get full 8 MB/s. Short of doing this what type of WiFi hardware could I buy that would assure getting the full speed in both houses. The routers currently in use use 20Mhz 802.11n 150Mbit but the reality is far lower.


John.

flutered

buy a connection from vodafone or whoever, here i am struggling with under 1 meg download and .390 upload, because eircom cannot afford to upgrade the line, if everyone paid their share, then perhaps us demented broadband users would see some improvement.

Akarinn

Get an ethernet cable and run it feom their house to yours, youl lose some speeds obviously with the lenght of the cable but if their at 8mbs youl still be far above your crappy speed of 1.5mb. So connect the cable to their router and then do your own DIY stuff to hide it in the ground of drill holes in the walls and pass it through then just connect your end of the cable to a mains ethernet adapter..? Bobs your uncle ye?

clearz

flutered wrote: »

buy a connection from vodafone or whoever, here i am struggling with under 1 meg download and .390 upload, because eircom cannot afford to upgrade the line, if everyone paid their share, then perhaps us demented broadband users would see some improvement.

Well that was helpful /s and even if I did go and buy a connection I would still want to do this to have access to 2x70 MB lines.

clearz

Akarinn wrote: »

Get an ethernet cable and run it feom their house to yours, youl lose some speeds obviously with the lenght of the cable but if their at 8mbs youl still be far above your crappy speed of 1.5mb. So connect the cable to their router and then do your own DIY stuff to hide it in the ground of drill holes in the walls and pass it through then just connect your end of the cable to a mains ethernet adapter..? Bobs your uncle ye?

I know I really am considering it. There is even a direct route already in place to bring the cable. It's only about 25 meters so there would be minimum loss.
What about using a gigabit connection?

ED E

clearz wrote: »

I know I really am considering it. There is even a direct route already in place to bring the cable. It's only about 25 meters so there would be minimum loss.
What about using a gigabit connection?

Get some good Cat6 cable, 25m is a short run but if its under ground you wanna use something decent not to have to change it later. Put in some PVC pipe or something as a duct and away you go. Wouldnt need to bury it deep. Then just drill two small holes into each home and feed the cable then weatherseal em.

White Heart Loon

It's a very bad idea to connect two houses with a copper cable. The houses will have separate earths, you could in fact be doubling the voltage if anything went wrong, you are joining two electrical circuits without a common ground. It's the same issue as connecting a Sky dish to two neighbouring houses. They get away with it in apartments as they have bonded earths (ground is common). Besides that, an insurance company would walk away from any claim if there ever was a fire.

Get two Ubiquiti Nanostations
http://www.ebay.ie/itm/Ubiquiti-NanoStation-M5-5GHz-Hi-Power-2x2-MIMO-AirMax-CPE-/121266289900?pt=UK_Computing_Other_Computing_Networking&hash=item1c3c08bcec

Some_Person

Use 2.4GHz NanoStations instead, it will work better through the walls/obstacles.

5Ghz is getting trashed by people just throwing up NanoStations and AC routers.
It's giving wireless ISPs a hard time.

White Heart Loon

If it's FTTC it'll be in a built up area, 2.4ghz will not work well. Anyway, 5.8ghz wouldn't work that well for an Isp in a built up area, every taxi company and the likes would be already using it.

ED E

White Heart Loon wrote: »

It's a very bad idea to connect two houses with a copper cable. The houses will have separate earths, you could in fact be doubling the voltage if anything went wrong, you are joining two electrical circuits without a common ground. It's the same issue as connecting a Sky dish to two neighbouring houses. They get away with it in apartments as they have bonded earths (ground is common). Besides that, an insurance company would walk away from any claim if there ever was a fire.

Surely there's a way to bypass it? I assume businesses used UTP links between buildings on the same campus before fiber too over? It must be possible to put a trip of some sort on the link?

Some_Person

White Heart Loon wrote: »

If it's FTTC it'll be in a built up area, 2.4ghz will not work well. Anyway, 5.8ghz wouldn't work that well for an Isp in a built up area, every taxi company and the likes would be already using it.

Alot of WISPS backhaul out from cities/urban areas,

He can experiment with different channels/channel widths and channel shifting.
I'm sure it will work decently.

There's even a built in spectrum analyzer to find the clearest channel.

White Heart Loon

ED E wrote: »

Surely there's a way to bypass it? I assume businesses used UTP links between buildings on the same campus before fiber too over? It must be possible to put a trip of some sort on the link?

Not without proper electrical engineering and planning. Ethernet only works up to a distance of 100m.

White Heart Loon

Some_Person wrote: »

Alot of WISPS backhaul out from cities/urban areas

They should be using licensed links in built up areas. I know Comreg see it as a cash cow, but it's got to be done, there's no excuse for it.

degsie

Your parents may be breaking their providers TOS by 'sharing' broadband between two postal addresses. If they are aware of this they are within their rights to cut the service. Be wary of doing this.

Calibos

I think I read that ethernet is reasonably safe to do as the cables will pop/blow the router before a dangerous voltage differential is reached. Not the case for Coax though.

When you say you are getting 1.5MB over wireless from the parents 70mbit connection I assume you mean data transfers are 1.5 megabytes per second. Not bad actually if you are wirelessly bridging between your current router and the parents router which halves the bandwidth.

What you could do which removes any voltage risk is to buy a POE (power over ethernet) equipped WAP (Wireless Access Point). You run the Exterior grade Cat 5e/6 from a POE injector connected to your parents router to the room where your computer resides in your house. This is connected to the POE WAP. As the WAP is in the same room as your computer you should get an excellent 5ghz signal giving you full wireless N (or AC if using compatible devices) speeds. No worries about congested 2.4ghz airwaves. Usually why people stick to congested 2.4ghz rather than using the 5ghz channels is that 5ghz is much more affected by obstructions/walls than 2.4ghz. In your case, with the WAP in the same room as the PC you should be able to use 5ghz without any problems.

As the WAP in your house/room is getting its power as well as network connection along the Cat 5e/6 cable coming from your parents house, this means there is no physical connection between the wiring in your house and theirs and thus no risks described above by others.

White Heart Loon

Calibos wrote: »

I think I read that ethernet is reasonably safe to do as the cables will pop/blow the router before a dangerous voltage differential is reached. Not the case for Coax though.

How safe is reasonably safe? Are you an electrical engineer? It's not a good idea to join electrical circuits, it's a fire risk. Besides, how would the insurance company be about it, if there ever was a fire in either house they'd walk away, that's guaranteed.

Alun

As White Heart Loon says it can be dangerous if the two properties concerned are on different earths.

You can get optical isolators for this kind of situation but they're pretty expensive and are also powered by PoE (Power over Ethernet) which will mean the added expense of PoE injectors at both ends too.

http://www.blackbox.com/Store/Detail.aspx/Ethernet-Data-Isolator-10BASE-T-100BASE-TX-1000BASE-T/SP427A

Cuddlesworth

You could pick up two of these, two of these, and a run of premade multimode fibre.

Akarinn

All this technical mumbo jumbo for a distance of less then 25m.. get some ethernet cable and some pipes, sorted.

White Heart Loon

Akarinn wrote: »

All this technical mumbo jumbo for a distance of less then 25m.. get some ethernet cable and some pipes, sorted.

Technical mumbo jumbo, Is that what you'll say to the insurance company? It's copper, it's a fire risk. Fiber is the safer option.

Akarinn

Think of it this way - if ethernet cable itself were a fire hazard, companies would not run MILES of it through their air-gap ceiling areas, where a fire could spread easily. So no, your ethernet cable will not spontaneously combust if it is used properly.

In an open space, Plenum-rated plastic shielding is used as a fire retardant on the cable. However, that is to protect the *spread* of a fire which would typically start elsewhere.

You have nothing to worry about as long as you use the ethernet properly - properly terminated, sending low voltage, low amp signals over it, and not lighting it on fire

White Heart Loon

Akarinn wrote: »

Think of it this way - if ethernet cable itself were a fire hazard, companies would not run MILES of it through their air-gap ceiling areas, where a fire could spread easily. So no, your ethernet cable will not spontaneously combust if it is used properly.

In an open space, Plenum-rated plastic shielding is used as a fire retardant on the cable. However, that is to protect the *spread* of a fire which would typically start elsewhere.

You have nothing to worry about as long as you use the ethernet properly - properly terminated, sending low voltage, low amp signals over it, and not lighting it on fire

Ethernet is not a fire risk, joining to houses with non bonded earths is.

Akarinn

Oh ok, but your option would be fiber cable. Calculate the price of 25 meters of cable and tell him so. Think your looking at about 6 or 7 euro for 1M of cable, and that's not including the connectors that it will take to connect all the single meters together..

Altho another far cheaper option would be to buy a high dbi antenna for the parents router then get yourself a nice wireless repeater with an Ethernet port for your house and connect it to an Ethernet mains plug..? You can get some really good cheap antennas on amazon.

White Heart Loon

Akarinn wrote: »

Oh ok, but your option would be fiber cable. Calculate the price of 25 meters of cable and tell him so. Think your looking at about 6 or 7 euro for 1M of cable, and that's not including the connectors that it will take to connect all the single meters together..

Altho another far cheaper option would be to buy a high dbi antenna for the parents router then get yourself a nice wireless repeater with an Ethernet port for your house and connect it to an Ethernet mains plug..? You can get some really good cheap antennas on amazon.

The price of fiber has been posted, less than €100 would cover it.
http://www.kenable.co.uk/product_info.php?cPath=22_122_280&products_id=6567

Sulla Felix

Hi OP.
I'm in the same boat, living next door to the parents. I share my connection with them rather than the other way around.
Installed a directional antenna and wireless range extender to cover their house with wifi. They're about 40m away so I put the antenna under their gable end and ran cable to the far end of the house (where the living room, kitchen etc is they wanted best coverage there).
Products I used were:
http://uk.tp-link.com/products/details/?model=TL-WA730RE
http://www.tp-link.com/en/products/details/?model=TL-ANT2409A
There is a bit of degradation but not all that much.

Akarinn

Sulla Felix wrote: »

Hi OP.
I'm in the same boat, living next door to the parents. I share my connection with them rather than the other way around.
Installed a directional antenna and wireless range extender to cover their house with wifi. They're about 40m away so I put the antenna under their gable end and ran cable to the far end of the house (where the living room, kitchen etc is they wanted best coverage there).
Products I used were:
http://uk.tp-link.com/products/details/?model=TL-WA730RE
http://www.tp-link.com/en/products/details/?model=TL-ANT2409A
There is a bit of degradation but not all that much.

To be honest this seems like a more solid option for someone who doesnt want to destroy the garden with piping or a long cable. Also drilling holes in walls and what not.

White Heart Loon

Akarinn wrote: »

To be honest this seems like a more solid option for someone who doesnt want to destroy the garden with piping or a long cable. Also drilling holes in walls and what not.

It's also the worst option. Just having a wireless repeater connected halves the wireless throughput of the whole network. Not much point in a provider giving an 802.11n wireless router when you half the speed of it.
http://bit.ly/1br4NOz

Some_Person

Just get two of these, it is simple and it WILL work with plenty of speed.

And this is not "repeating", it's a mini point to point link.

Cuddlesworth

At 70mb with the possibility of future speed increases, I'd just run the cable and treat both houses as the same network. I'm assuming that the houses are really around 15 metres apart, that would be too close for those Ubiquiti M2's. You would be overloading the receiver on both units. They are actually quite good devices but are designed for a level of distance between them.

fat-tony

Akarinn wrote: »

Think of it this way - if ethernet cable itself were a fire hazard, companies would not run MILES of it through their air-gap ceiling areas, where a fire could spread easily. So no, your ethernet cable will not spontaneously combust if it is used properly.

In an open space, Plenum-rated plastic shielding is used as a fire retardant on the cable. However, that is to protect the *spread* of a fire which would typically start elsewhere.

You have nothing to worry about as long as you use the ethernet properly - properly terminated, sending low voltage, low amp signals over it, and not lighting it on fire

Mains electricity is supplied as three phase with 240V between each phase (live) and neutral. Adjacent properties could be on different phases and connecting devices with an electrically conducting wire between properties could potentially create a 400V difference between devices which would create a hazard if a fault developed in the equipment. It's not good advice to suggest connecting mains connected equipment between different properties unless an earth bonding scheme is in place.