sharing UFB three ways including 2KM p2p link

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Marmalade

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#160385 5-Jan-2015 10:41

I'm hoping someone might be able to recommend a setup that would allow me to share a UFB connection three ways. My neighbour has a 13m tower and he's happy to let me use it to put up a Ubiquity Nanobeam M5 pointing at a friend about 2 km away who has UFB.

I want to be able to share the UFB internet with:

* the person 2 km away who actually has it connected
* my neighbour
* me

My house to the tower, my neighbour to the tower, and my house to my neighbour are all about 30-50 m distance apart.

I'm not sure if I'm going to have to buy numerous Nanobeams, or dig loads of trenches back and forth (for ethernet) or what. Should I buy a switch? Two? Managed? What device should provide the DHCP?

Confused...

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#1208370 5-Jan-2015 10:48

I used to share Vodafone cable between my neighbour (techie) and myself, but our houses were only about 4m apart so we just ran a cable...

You could run ethernet cables everywhere if you wanted. You'll need power at the tower anyway, for whatever wireless equipment you put up there.

Ethernet vs wireless -- depends on how much time, and how much money you want to expend on the project. If there's no power near the tower, you'll have to trench or run aerial cable to it, in which case that may as well be ethernet cabling. Ethernet cable is cheap but digging trenches takes time.

If you had two or three wireless connections to the tower (2km away person and either yourself or your neighbour or all three of you) could you use e.g. a 90 degree sector antenna to cover all of them, or would you need something wider or even an omni? You might want to get a map and a protractor out.

Marmalade

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#1208402 5-Jan-2015 11:04

Thanks for your reply. I'm thinking ethernet would be the most reliable, and the cheapest. Tower to me (30m) where I have the POE and an ethernet switch which then sends a second ethernet cable (~70m) back to the neighbour.

I'm not sure what the UFB situation is — thinking of going with Slingshot, who seem to provide a 4-port fibre modem. Is that likely to be any good? I'm guessing it would have to be the DHCP server?

deadlyllama

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#1208433 5-Jan-2015 11:49

Ardgowan: Thanks for your reply. I'm thinking ethernet would be the most reliable, and the cheapest. Tower to me (30m) where I have the POE and an ethernet switch which then sends a second ethernet cable (~70m) back to the neighbour.

I'm not sure what the UFB situation is — thinking of going with Slingshot, who seem to provide a 4-port fibre modem. Is that likely to be any good? I'm guessing it would have to be the DHCP server?

I'm assuming you don't have the skillset to configure a more complicated router (like a Mikrotik)? If you did, that would give you some additional flexibility and let you generate graphs of traffic use per user, etc.

If you don't have that skillset, go with what the provider gives you, otherwise getting support when things go wrong will be a pain.

Marmalade

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#1208512 5-Jan-2015 13:20

If the level of complexity is anything like running DD-WRT which I've done for years, then I should be fine.

Having not had UFB myself, I'm unsure whether the UFB "box on the wall" has an ethernet port on it, or whether a modem is needed to convert it to a usable internet connection. If the former, then any standard switch should do the trick, right? But if the latter, can you buy 3rd party UFB modems?

macuser

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#1208515 5-Jan-2015 13:24

Ardgowan: If the level of complexity is anything like running DD-WRT which I've done for years, then I should be fine.

Having not had UFB myself, I'm unsure whether the UFB "box on the wall" has an ethernet port on it, or whether a modem is needed to convert it to a usable internet connection. If the former, then any standard switch should do the trick, right? But if the latter, can you buy 3rd party UFB modems?

ONT is untagged, so requires a router with Vlan tagging support to convert it into usable internet traffic.

The Slingshot router isn't great, as the ethernet is only 100Mbps. It will do though.

deadlyllama

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#1208525 5-Jan-2015 13:35

Ardgowan: If the level of complexity is anything like running DD-WRT which I've done for years, then I should be fine.

Having not had UFB myself, I'm unsure whether the UFB "box on the wall" has an ethernet port on it, or whether a modem is needed to convert it to a usable internet connection. If the former, then any standard switch should do the trick, right? But if the latter, can you buy 3rd party UFB modems?

The UFB box on the wall (the ONT) has ethernet ports, and phone ports, but it is *not a router*. Depending on your ISP, and if you've got phone service at all, phone service is either provided by a phone port on the router the ISP supplied (most common; that's what Slingshot, Orcon and Snap do), or a phone port on the ONT (Compass, MyRepublic). And Telecom/Spark were using the old copper to your house for phone service -- are they still doing that?

The router your ISP provides will get a single IP address when it plugs into the ONT, either over DHCP or PPPoE, maybe on a special VLAN, maybe not. Then it will do NAT and serve out DHCP to your local PCs. The way this is set up depends entirely on the ISP. I'm on Orcon who do DHCP over VLAN 10. I'm looking at switching to MyRepublic who do DHCP with no VLAN tag. Snap do PPPoE over VLAN 10.

Any Mikrotik router will work with any of the above setups but I'd advise finding someone who can show you the ropes -- it's considerably more complex to set up than DD-WRT. And of course if something goes wrong, your ISP may say "oh, you're not using our supplied router? that's not a supported configuration." I am comfortable being in that situation, but you may not be.

I'd also advise you to get an agreement with the neighbour who can get UFB to allow you access to their house (i.e. a key) when things go wrong -- e.g. if the router blows up and they're on holiday. And to let everyone know that if the internet breaks they have to talk to you, not your ISP. Unless they're techies who you can trust.

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timmmay

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#1208533 5-Jan-2015 13:41

You may also want to look at contracts - you'd be effectively sharing an internet connection which may be against the ISP T&C.

chevrolux

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#1208578 5-Jan-2015 14:23

Pretty much all depends on how much you want to spend.

I would trench from your house to the tower to get Ethernet on to the tower. Then it is simply a pair of NanoBeams to do the link.

The WAN side tagging isn't really an issue at all. Most CPE can do this. What you need to think about more is how do you want to share your connection? Just simple single subnet across all 3 sites? All more complex with each site in it's own VLAN?

You need Mikrotik.... If it was me I would have a "core" router (where the UFB is) to make the WAN connection and then on the LAN side have 3 VLAN's so each site can have it's own subnet. Then each site has it's own 'cpe' to un-tag the correct traffic.
This way you can run Queues to limit traffic to each site so everyone gets a fair share of the UFB connection. Also there is no double NAT.

Marmalade

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#1208642 5-Jan-2015 16:27

I am currently thinking of using two http://www.ubnt.com/airmax/nanobeam-ac/ for the wireless link. There's a chance the original UFB premises may not want want the internet, in which case could I go straight from the wall into the first NanoBeam, and do all the ISP connection and routing from the NanoBeam?

Assuming they DO want internet, are you talking about something like http://www.gowifi.co.nz/ethernet-adsl/mikrotik-routerboard-rb750-five-port-router.html instead of the Slingshot-provided router? Slingshot calls theirs a "wireless fibre four port modem". By modem do they just mean a router that's capable of connecting to the ISP via whatever protocol they happen to use?

sbiddle

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#1208651 5-Jan-2015 16:52

Good luck using a Nanobeam AC. The AC kit is so unstable tin cans and string will give you a more reliable internet connection.

A Nanobeam is not a router. You would still need a router. If you wanted to do an all in one solution you'd have to use Mikrotik gear.

kiwirock

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#1208655 5-Jan-2015 17:09

I used to use Ubiquiti gear. I went Mikrotik and have never looked back. I use the SXT units for wireless. The lite version I believe is less than $100 but I use the standard one's.

I personally wouldn't use Ethernet. I don't like any cables be they isolated from another house or not. You could end up with a potentially close to mains voltage between houses if not all isolated and grounded correctly or something goes faulty.

I'd go the Wi-fi route it's easiest.

If I wanted a hard line to my neighbour, I'd use a switch or router that will do media conversion to a fibre cable to my neighours. But Wi-Fi is the easiest obviously.

If not, I'd run my own fibre between the two houses for electrical safety and wi-fi to the 2km tower.

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Marmalade

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#1311225 25-May-2015 12:27

A bit of an update — I got two of the NanoBeam 5AC-19's and love them.

Chorus finally installed fibre at my friend's house two weeks ago after several weeks' delay. Thus I've had the link up for two weeks now, and have to say it's been awesome. It's been rock-solid from the moment it was plugged in, whether running initially on the original RC firmware, then briefly on the beta, and now on the newly-released 7.1.1.

Whether it's due to luck, or the simplicity of my setup, or whatever, based on the one-off evidence I have seen I'd recommend these radios in a heartbeat.

I still haven't aimed my end properly (it's 8m in the air temporarily mounted and I need to hire a cherry-picker to do it properly) but regardless, I'm getting ~175 to 200 Mb/s TX and RX — well more than I need for the 100/20 Mb/s fibre connection.

Just ran a speed test again, from my house i.e. via the radio connection:

Basically the same numbers as I get at my friend's house on a direct ethernet connection i.e. the radios don't affect the speeds in any way.

Thanks all for your advice!

DarkShadow

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#1312382 27-May-2015 00:08

So what other gear did you pick in the end?

Marmalade

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#1312534 27-May-2015 10:35

The only gear I had to buy in the end was the two NanoBeam 5AC-19's. Oh and about 50m of ToughCable (weatherproof ethernet). Gowifi have been awesome, incidentally.

The overall setup is now like this:

Fibre to friend's house, into Vodafone's standard-issue wifi router (Huawei HG659 — it's not all that bad, surprisingly). This provides DHCP for both her house, and ours.

NanoBeam #1 goes straight into one of the ethernet ports on the Huawei router.

NanoBeam #2 (1km away, at my house) goes straight into my Airport Extreme (the tower-shaped one) via ethernet.

One NanoBeam is set to "Access Point PTP" and the other to "Station PTP", network mode "Bridge" on both.

The downside is that both houses are on the same network, so for example, I could easily print to her printer. It's not really an issue in my case and saves doing anything complicated.

At some point I will get a third NanoBeam, same as the existing two, for my neighbour, and point it at NanoBeam #1. The firmware that came out a week or two ago now allows these devices to do PTMP (point to multi-point) so #1 will be able to communicate with both #2 and #3. That's the hope anyway!

qyiet

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#1312787 27-May-2015 14:43

Ardgowan: A bit of an update — I got two of the NanoBeam 5AC-19's and love them.

I also have two NanoBeam 5AC-19s in Point to Point with zero issues. My link seems to have approx. 310Mbps of throughput. I see sbiddle recommend against them, but I've not had any issues at all. I do have a short link (less than 50m)

Warning: reality may differ from above post

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