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Wireless Network Solutions for a Metropolitan Area?
An anonymous reader asks: "I work for a company that is expanding into multiple buildings within the same office park. We have line-of-sight between the buildings and are looking into wireless alternatives.
Does anyone have experience with products such as Proxim's Tsunami or Bridgewave's GE60 Gigabit wireless link?
The point-to-point links will need to support the usual LAN traffic (SMB, HTTP, SMTP, etc.) as well as VOIP. The buildings are not large--up to 140 users, whose main network use would be e-mail, printing, and saving Excel documents to file servers, as well as the aforementioned VOIP).
Are these connections any more secure and reliable than using something in the 802.11 family of protocols?"
If its all in one complex see about the options to having fiber pulled inside existing conduits. Otherwise it's time to justify the cost over a number of years, and allow for a redundant pathing setup & better hardware. Do 3 links and run OSPF on the back side - that way you're safe in the event of one link failure. Also consider CanoBeam (Canon) free air optics http://www.usa.canon.com/html/industrial_canobeam/ canobeam/canobeam130.html which may also work better for you, depending on needs.
Keep in mind that fog and tall buildings can impact performance on laser based systems, but compare this to everyone 's wifi APs as background noise. Just make sure to go to either licenses bands or the 5.8ghz range if you go the radio path.
Saw this at a trade show this year (see boss I do learn from these things) http://www.lightpointe.com/home.cfm and from what I saw they have the technology and the bandwidth to handle most LAN's today. I did ask the rep if fog, rain, and snow etc... plays a part in the reliability of the connection. He said yes it does but you have to have major conditions (hurricane) for the connection to drop completely. If you go this route I would ask for a demo of it and research more QOS issues.
Sig