School network advice

[AntiThesis]

So I've taken over the IT needs of two schools here. \0/

We're wanting to establish a link between the two schools as they're amalgamated into one single school (with two campuses).

Problem 1) There's a public road between us. Now, we're going to own the road and close it off in the near future but it's not ours yet.

Problem 2) My budget is not huge.

Is it illegal to simply run a wireless link (line of sight) between the two campuses? Ideally we'd like to have fibre going at some point but as mentioned there's a road in the way.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated :D

[Kloon]

Id say go the wireless route, its not illegal as you are not going to provide a service to others at a cost over the link, its simply a private link to connect 2 places.

[AntiThesis]

Oh ho. That's interesting. I spose the two wireless units will be locked to each other (they certainly won't be open for anyone to bloody use).

Now I gotta find decent EQ to buy :D Anyone heard of Acconet?

[Kloon]

Try Mikrotik devices, we wugs use them for all our wireless needs.

[The_Librarian]

Ja, go wireless, and line them up 100% - and lock others out.

As long as the link does not get swamped by data transmission, it should hold up OK.

What kind of data will be passing through?

[Franna]

How far is it between the server rooms in each building, across the road.

If it is less than 100m I would consider laying a standard 1000M CAT6 ethernet cable.

[bdt]

Same distance question, but with a (possibly!) :D dippy answer: look at RONJA (http://ronja.twibright.com/) (also see El Wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RONJA))

What is Ronja?
Ronja (Reasonable Optical Near Joint Access) is an User Controlled Technology (like Free Software) project of optical point-to-point data link. The device has 1.4km range and has stable 10Mbps full duplex data rate. Ronja is an optoelectronic device you can mount on your house and connect your PC, home or office network with other networks. Or you can use it as a general purpose wireless link for building any other networking project.

The design is released under the GNU Free Documentation License: you get all the necessary documentation and construction guides free. The material costs are very low, about 100 USD. The operation is immune to interference and quite reliable - interrupted only by dense fog. (http://ronja.twibright.com/about.php)

[gregmcc]

How much bandwidth do you need between the 2 buildings. How many users are doing to be using it?

Wireless could well be the way to do but if you have 100's of users using the wireless or need a high speed line you might want to look at putting fibre or at least 100 ethernet.

[AntiThesis]

We'd of course like as much BW as we can get going but we can't lay cable as it would cross a public road (which we don't yet own). Looks like we'll use Mikrotik EQ to get the link up and going which should provide us with decent BW.

The distance is approx 500m between the line of sight points.

[ColinR]

That will work nicely, don't skimp on the Mikrotik hardware though, the smaller boards are not too athletic.

[AntiThesis]

Looks like thanks to the supreme advice offered by Kloon we'll probably end up with:

http://www.miro.co.za/wireless_kit.aspx

and then a CPE unit for the other end.