A while back one of my clients opened up a small satellite office. They had only one PC and simply needed to connect back to their main (only) server. You’re probably already thinking what they were thinking, setup a VPN. The snag here was that they had NO internet access at all, NONE. The client thought he had a solution though, get a satellite dish. I objected arguing that your typical satellite has a slow upload speed. Mostly I was against it because when you looked out of the window on the buildings third floor, you could see the main office. With such a short distance between the buildings AND a line of site, I wanted to try something. But they pushed for the satellite/vpn solution anyway. As expected, it was slow, useless actually.
So they cancelled the satellite and let me try my idea, a point to point wifi link. The line of sight distance couldn’t have been much farther than 1/4 mile, if that. I did a little research and came up the Ubiquiti Networks NanoStation2. At around $80 a piece, I was skeptical they would do the job as some configurations were running into the thousands of dollars. But they seemed to have all the features I needed so I ordered them up along with some mounting hardware.
The setup was a BREEZE, like Linksys easy, mounting them to the building took longer. We turned them on and the two buildings were linked, just like that. The response time was just what you would expect from your typical 54g access point. And these things just WORK. They’ve been out there in the rain, snow, sun and the only time the link went down was when some awning installers accidently tugged too hard on the ethernet cable and popped it loose. Besides that, we set the link up in winter and there were some bare trees that could potentially obscure the line of sight come springtime. When spring came, sure enough the new leaves were in the way but the link remained strong.
Needless to say, I’ve been very impressed with the devices and I’ve seen them popping up in typical Wifi AP setups (although they look out of place). Here’s a shot of the setup from the main office’s roof. The red circle is the other AP.
TechnoGreg 