Neighborhood Network

[jpalmer150]

So I live 2 miles out of town and have no decent internet service options other than crappy DSL.

My neighbor is the town Vet and his clinic is located just inside of town. It is serviceable by the local cable company up to 1GB/second. So we want to purchase 100Mb service to the vet clinic and then beam it out to our location and share it with the 5 homes in the neighborhood.

I also have to provide a secure network to the vet clinic using the same service/connection.

I'm trying to prevent a bunch of Daisy Chaining but it seems unavoidable without spending thousands for a bunch of stacked switches.

Have a look at my attached initial design. Does anyone have any suggestions? How would you do it differently?

[stj]

Re: Neighborhood Network

do you have a direct line with nothing in the way? because if you do - TP-Link make long-range wifi kit that will go 50x that range wih the right antenna!
going the wired route, you probably need to use fiber - but it would be vulnerable if it wasnt underground.

[jpalmer150]

Re: Neighborhood Network

Yes we're erecting two 50' antenna towers and will have direct line of site. I've been looking at the Ubiquiti products, specifically the Nanobeam:

http://www.amazon.com/Ubiquiti-Netwo...words=nanobeam

[mariushm]

Re: Neighborhood Network

Have a look at this product, recently reviewed on LinusTechTips :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LG-AZz_nm5E

It's Ubiquity Powerbeam AC ( PBE-5AC-500 ) : https://www.ubnt.com/airmax/powerbeam-ac/

There's four pages of comments on the Linus forum : https://linustechtips.com/main/topic...istance-wi-fi/

[jpalmer150]

Re: Neighborhood Network

Thanks but the antennas are the easy part. Any feedback on the network design, Routers, Swiches?....any thoughts?

[stj]

Re: Neighborhood Network

how's the weather?
if it's not raining, a laser-link would get the highest bandwidth.

http://www.tp-link.com/en/products/biz-list-37.html
those are wifi & antenna combined for external polemount.

how many ways do you need to split it?

[jpalmer150]

Re: Neighborhood Network

I need to split it into two at the main router and then further split one main trunk 5 more times. Have a look at the documents I attached above. What's your opinion of those diagrams?

Thanks for the laser tip.

[stj]

Re: Neighborhood Network

the split could be done with a simple 8way gigabit router like a TP-Link TL-SG1008 although you probably want something smart / managed to enforce security.

but what concerns me is the so-called "comercial wireless router"
what you actually need is a small pc with 4 ethernet ports acting as a gateway & router (and possibly firwall / QOS enforcement)
because you dont want those 5 houses having access to each other or to the vet's internal stuff.
and you dont want one user hogging all the bandwidth.

[diif]

Re: Neighborhood Network

I don't see a need for POE switch on the residential side. As above I'd replace the "commercial wireless router" with a managed switch (a bit overkill) or a small PC running a Linux firewall something like smoothwall or m0n0wall.
Replace the POE switch with a managed switch that does VLANs and QoS.

[Uniballer]

Re: Neighborhood Network

I have DSL. The closest cable company told me I could get Internet service from them, but it would cost me $4700. If I had 4 other homeowners to share that cost with it might be the best way to go (good bandwidth, cable company will maintain it, no radio problems, etc.). Have you investigated options like that?

Your equipment layout doesn't get specific about any equipment. I think the "commercial router" at the vet's office matters a lot (e.g. there is a big difference between, say Dell SonicWall and Belkin). It might be better to have two devices there: one that manages splitting the traffic and another that provides the vet's LAN security (he probably has PCI compliance concerns, whether he knows it or not). It looks like you are depending on a mere switch at your end of the radio link between towers. VLANs are good for limiting broadcast traffic and so on, but might not be bulletproof enough for security. But it may be OK depending on the capabilities of the equipment that operates the link between towers.

Have you considered lightning protection on the equipment wired to the towers?

I would avoid trying to use the 192.168.1.0/24 address space anywhere in your network because so many low-end devices self-configure that way, and even with NAT you could wind up with address ambiguity. Maybe pick something in the middle of the 172.16.0.0/12 block.

What are your plans concerning future deployment of IPv6 routing? Unless you get the equipment dirt cheap (used) you should be buying IPv6 capable gear now.

Are the homeowners going to select and configure their own routers? Are they aware of the security implications? Are they aware of the possible service limitations (e.g. this might not work well enough in bad weather to allow Vonage to be their only telephone link). Are you prepared to be their technical support crew at 3 AM? What about when they decide that it is unfair that your service is faster than theirs (because you are wired to the inter-tower link and they depend on WiFi)?

Are you planning to tell the upstream provider that you are doing this? Or is the vet going to take the heat if you get caught?