Wireless Bridging between schools and a Datacentre

ddddd12231 · May 4, 2014

So in my home town in the Middle East, there are quite a lot of schools and universities and I was wondering how my team could connect these schools together, using only wireless technology (Like P2P Wireless Bridging) to a data centre. In said data centre, the internet access and the Windows Domain Forest Main DC will be there. There would also be a DC in all the schools and universities. Maybe not Internet Access unless we get a pretty fast connection in the data centre.

I would like to know how this could be done and which hardware would be best to use. There are many forums that I've read but they only talk about 2 buildings. I'm talking about 15+. Ubiquiti have good reviews but unfortunately, I don't know how far apart these are. According to Google Maps, it's around 3-5km. So only those that suffice that range because the more powerful ones than needed are a more of a health risk.

We may also team with a ISP that has underground cables to setup a VPN/LAN between the schools, but I would like to know about Wireless for now.

Many thanks in advance.

abailey · May 4, 2014

How much bandwidth do you need between each link? Also a map would be helpful to show where all the buildings are in relation to each other to see if P2P or P2MP would work.

bill001g · May 5, 2014

You need to figure out how your traffic flows. Setting up a any-any network generally will be expensive at those distances. You also don't want to run pure hub and spoke design if your traffic needs to flow between the spoke sites. If for example all the end locations only talk to the main data center a hub and spoke is fine. If you had multiple data centers that need to talk you may be better off putting in some direct connection to avoid using all your bandwidth at the main location for spoke to spoke traffic.

Setting up the technology is actually the easier part of the project. Figuring out how your traffic will flow and how much bandwidth you are going to need is tends to be much harder...especially when nobody really knows because it does not exist yet.

If you are considering a external company to do this get bids from a couple of the larger telco operators in your area. What you want to ask for is a fully managed MPLS network. This will avoid you having to get involved with the details of the router and will give you a any-any network. You still will need to do the hard part of estimating the traffic loads on each location so you can request the proper size circuits. As long as you have your bandwidth requirements figured out and they don't have to help you with that part they will normally give you a quote for free. The main costs will always be determined by how much telco capacity already exists in the buildings and who owns it.

ddddd12231 · May 29, 2014

bill001g :

You need to figure out how your traffic flows. Setting up a any-any network generally will be expensive at those distances. You also don't want to run pure hub and spoke design if your traffic needs to flow between the spoke sites. If for example all the end locations only talk to the main data center a hub and spoke is fine. If you had multiple data centers that need to talk you may be better off putting in some direct connection to avoid using all your bandwidth at the main location for spoke to spoke traffic.

Setting up the technology is actually the easier part of the project. Figuring out how your traffic will flow and how much bandwidth you are going to need is tends to be much harder...especially when nobody really knows because it does not exist yet.

If you are considering a external company to do this get bids from a couple of the larger telco operators in your area. What you want to ask for is a fully managed MPLS network. This will avoid you having to get involved with the details of the router and will give you a any-any network. You still will need to do the hard part of estimating the traffic loads on each location so you can request the proper size circuits. As long as you have your bandwidth requirements figured out and they don't have to help you with that part they will normally give you a quote for free. The main costs will always be determined by how much telco capacity already exists in the buildings and who owns it.

Thanks a lot.

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