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?"

Comments

Don't rely on inherent "security"

[TCM]

I would always run a VPN on top of anything wireless, especially when carrying sensitive information for a company. If you are unsure about the security of a solution, run security that you are sure of on top.

Re:Laser Link

[aderusha]

The technology you are talking about is called free-space optical and is fairly mature. For the distances you are shooting, you should be able to run gigabit reliably. They are relatively secure, but you'd still want to run some sort of VPN over the link (at gigabit speeds this may be difficult). For shorter distances (such as those listed), you will find they are plenty reliable and can handle even heavy rain if installed correctly.

Addition - locate as much as close to the user

[ejoe_mac]

Also, do what you can to cut back on cross building traffic. Make sure each building has a local print server, and locate user files closest to the users that will access them. Sending a 100mb print job to the copier around the corner shouldn't involve data leaving the building.