Wifi to home office 150/200m away from property

Finally got my log cabin/shed/home office/man cave built, now I need to get internet down to it.

Its approx 170m away and has line of sight from the house.

We’ve fibre to property with about 50mbps so can afford a slight drop in performance, I’m guessing the best option is directional repeaters/ptp of some description?

Any experience recommendations on best reasonably priced kit to use?

Satellite.

does the power come from the house?

Run an ethernet cable alongside with a repeater half way?

I’ll be honest – I might have found a solution to this problem *before* I built the thing…

Is there electric in the office using the same supply as your home?

If so homeplugs may work.

Ubiquiti stuff seems to have a good rep, though not the cheapest it doesn’t seem unreasonably priced. Quick browse suggests it’s an achievable range for a point to point bridge.

Powerline adapters are much cheaper if it’s an option but I’m not sure what their effective range is.

https://www.wikihow.com/Make-a-Cantenna

I ran a length of CAT 5 cable within a hose pipe to mine. Some of it is buried, other sections still hooked over the fence waiting for me to sort from 7 years ago.

External Cat 6 to mine but its only about 20m…

I think it’s too far for a cabled connection, plus I’m buggered if I’m digging 200m of cable into the field!

I’ll be honest – I might have found a solution to this problem *before* I built the thing…

I did but it was that long ago I can’t remember what it was – too many acronyms 😆

Limit is 100m for cable. But you can do power over Ethernet to run a repeater at 100m to take you to 200m. Running the cable should be nothing more than jam a spade in the dirt, wiggle repeat (and/or run along fence bottoms etc).

I’m not sure I would run network cable down unless it was well protected against lightning.  There would be nothing worse that a hit taking out computers etc. connected and proper lightning protection is expensive

If you have a way to run cable then fibre optic isn’t a bad choice.  You can buy premade cables so you don’t need to mess around terminating them.  You would need kit at both ends to convert the signal though so still not hugely cheap

WiFi might be best but it will depend a little on exactly where you are.  See if you can see lots of other channels around first.  If it’s not too bad then I’d be tempted to go with some form of wifi extender with an outdoor directional antenna.  I suspect that would be your cheapest option

Is there electric in the office using the same supply as your home?

If so homeplugs may work.

This.  Cable range for homeplugs is about 300m I think.

UniFi Long Range claims to work out to 183m, so you’re (just) in limit.  How effective it’d be at that distance I don’t know.

Ethernet caps out at 100m, so you’d need a powered repeater halfway along the run.

In an ideal world a fibre run would be best, but it’ll be megabucks.

Another option could be a 4G router, but then you’ve got ongoing costs here rather than an initial outlay.

Or you could build your own yagi.

WiFi might be best but it will depend a little on exactly where you are.  See if you can see lots of other channels around first.  If it’s not too bad then I’d be tempted to go with some form of wifi extender with an outdoor directional antenna.  I suspect that would be your cheapest option

We’re out in the sticks with only 4 other properties near us, nothing in direction of shed for miles.

Homeplugs sounds interesting, will look into them.

4G router was my backup plan should it not be possible.

Ethernet over UTP has a maximum range of 100 metres (90 metre cable run 10 metres for patch cables recommended). If you have a point half way at which you can supply power (and is dry) you could deploy an Ethernet switch to repeat the signal. Some Ethernet switches can be powered by USB so you could bodge something (switch and battery pack in a tupperware box) but you would soon get pissed off charging the battery.

The best option would be to use fibre optic links. I notice that you can get 200 metre patch cables so it would be a simple as getting an Ethernet switch with suitable fibre port at each end and plugging them together – should be good for 1 Gbps.

200 metre fibre cable

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Meter-Multimode-Duplex-Fiber-Optic/dp/B00551B88C

8 Port Gigabit Switch with SFP slot

https://www.amazon.co.uk/D-Link-DGS-1210-08P-Gigabit-Managed-fanless/dp/B00DOQ25SW

1000BaseSX SFP module

https://www.amazon.co.uk/D-Link-DEM-311GT-1000BASE-SX-Mini-GBIC-Ethernet/dp/B000087LFF/

This setup would give you the best speed possible at a vaguely sensible price. The fibre patch cable is not designed to live outside without some form of protection. You may be able to find a supplier who could offer armoured patch cables in this length.

The alternative would be some form of wireless but this could be more expensive and will not offer the same speed and could be effected by weather etc.

The 100m isn’t a hard stop btw. Lots of things can affect the signal quality. I’ve got a camera streaming HD on 150M CAT6 cable run. The signal will degrade after 100M but it is a gamble if you want to go longer. I assume your ‘load’ is fairly light?

In my case the person installing it got lucky and didn’t realise the length until it got a network tester on it.

Coax cable to shed and additional internet only account with your ISP?

5thelephant’s suggestion of two UTP cable runs linked by a PoE repeater sounds good. The repeater can be powered via the Ethernet cable by a PoE injector in the house.

PoE Repeater – £142

https://www.startech.com/uk/Networking-IO/Media-Converters/Ethernet-Extenders/gigabit-poe-extender~POEEXT1GAT

PoE Injector – £126

https://www.startech.com/uk/Networking-IO/Media-Converters/Ethernet-Extenders/gigabit-poe-injector~POEINJ1GW

Plus cabling costs but those should not be too high.

Or buy a couple of ubiquiti nanostations (£75 each) and get a reliable 100mbit over that distance without the bother of digging a trench.

Do the same with 2 nanostations and it’s great

Nano stations sound like the best bet then, as long as the connection speed doesn’t drop too much it sounds the easiest option.

Cheers for l the help/info/suggestions guys.

Is no-one else going to question the OP having a 170m long garden?!

This must be the place:

Wishful thinking 😆

2 bed cottage with a couple of fields!

Just to get this clear –

I could get 2 Nanostation Loco M2s or similar, a couple of ethernet cables and a second router for the office and we should be good to go?

I’ve run dual CAT-5 to our workshop, just tacked outdoor Grade cable to the fence…

It’s covered by plants most of the way, so you don’t notice it. My only concern is if the neighbour puts up a trellis etc I bet she’ll spear the cable!

Dual CAT-5 running along fence by Ben Freeman[/url], on Flickr

For 170m I’d run fibre and use media converters to go CAT-5 <-> Fibre.

In the 5 years or so it’s been up, only had one lightning surge, it blew all the outside lights, but CAT-5 was all OK. Cost me about £30 in new PSUs and a few hours to get all the lights working again.

I use TP-Link powerline adapters to my home office via the mains – works flawlessly, but it’s only about 15 metres away. Worth a try for about £25 a pair.

I’ve never tried it myself, but DIY directional wifi antennae made out of tin cans are supposed to be very effective.  Just needs wifi boxes with external antennae.  See link above, or this one:

https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-make-a-wifi-antenna-out-of-a-pringles-can-nb/

I use TP-Link powerline adapters to my home office via the mains – works flawlessly, but it’s only about 15 metres away. Worth a try for about £25 a pair.

Just had a look at these, they claim 300m range so may be worth a try for the price.

Can you put a router/acces point on the other end?

Aiui you can plug anything into it that you can plug into a normal network cable. I have a little hub on mine that gives me a couple of wired network points and wifi. All seems to work fine, albeit at 20m from the house.

Just to finish this one off to anyone who may stumble across it on a search…

I bought a pair of Ubiquity Nanostation NS-5ACLs and a UniFi access point. Super impressed with them, simple to set up, the access point even came preconfigured after supplying details on purchase.

We have 50mb/s at the house, 200m away at the office I’ve got 47mb/s without having fiddled with the settings. Throughput between them averages out at about 550mb/s so think I could get it higher and it hasn’t dropped the connection as yet.

With all the cables, PoE adapters etc it came to around £200 so sensibly priced solution to the problem.

Thanks to all for the advice/help on here!

Nice.  Cheers for the update.

Glad you went with the nanostations, mine have given 2y of perfect service!

Bonus points for the update,

https://xkcd.com/979/

Ubiquity are putting out some nice stuff right now  I’ve been recommended them for a while