I preface my thoughts by saying that I am not a certified expert in the
field of wireless networking and that my opinions are solely that,
opinions. With that said, however, I have had some experience with
several wi-fi vendors and with installing various types of wi-fi
infrastructure.
In particular, I have found that the sky pilot radios are designed with
Internet Service Provider layouts in mind (lower bandwidth residential
and smb installs to get clients 128k to 2-3 mb access to the Internet).
They may not be capable of running at full wireless 802.11
specifications. The sky pilots are also optimized, I believe, for mesh
wireless networking. This mesh networking propensity increases the
latency characteristics of packet transfer. You may be able to change
the bandwidth limitation settings and perhaps decrease latency from the
command line. According to a quick scan of the sky pilot command line
reference available here:
http://www.skypilot.com/support/documents/skydownload.php?file=Cmd_Line_Interface_Reference.pdf
, the settraffic rate command only accepts parameters between 64 kbps -
10000 kbps (or 10 mb).
On the commodity grade wireless networking class of hardware side of
things, I have had very good luck with Engenius' 600 milliwatt products,
e.g. the ECB 8610S (for internal AP's) or the EOC-8610S-EXT (for
external uses). The 8610's support 802.11 a, b, and g and appear to
remain stable under heavy loads. The Engenius units support VLAN
passthrough, but don't support VLAN's directly on the unit. In other
words, you could probably run VLAN trunks between the switches in each
building and pass those through the wi-fi link. Please, however, before
you try such an implementation, call the Engenius technical support
people and ask them directly. Here's the web address:
http://www.engeniustech.com .
You could also always set up a couple of embedded PFSense devices on
each side of your link with Wi-Fi cards, etc, and use those devices as
your point-to-point connection between buildings. You should
double-check hardware compatibility, and this is probably not the
cheapest or easiest method to meet your needs.
I hope this has provided you with some helpful information.
Thanks,
Vaughn L. Reid III
Ugo Bellavance wrote:
Chris Bagnall a écrit :
We are currently using vlans because we have VoIP services going
through
this and different kind of users. Everything is working OK as of now.
However, the max bandwidth of one WiFi link like that is about 10
mbps.
To increase the total bandwidth, we want to add another antenna in
Building 1.
I don't know the layout of the buildings, but have you considered
using point-to-point laser links between the buildings? I was
involved in a project at a site earlier this year that was happily
getting 100mbps between buildings using roof-mounted lasers.
Much lower latency than 802.11a/b/g as well (assuming that's what
you're using).
If you do stick with WiFi, I'd not worry too much about the downtime
- a) it should only be a few minutes, and b) it can probably be
managed such that it's done during off peak hours.
Can you give us any more information about the WiFi hardware at each
end? I'm not sure simple port trunking on the switches (which is what
I guess you're suggesting in the first approach) is going to do the
job if the WiFi devices are essentially standard APs, since I presume
they'd have their own IP addresses?
If the WiFi devices were operating at a lower level than IP, it'd
probably work, possibly if they were using some sort of L2TP
tunnelling internally? (though you might then have to consider packet
fragmentation, depending on the packet size)
The antennas are SkyPilots. They do have an IP address, for
configuration, but I think they could also be configured via console.
Thanks a lot for your input on this OT matter :).
Ugo
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