Help in setting up networking for a charity

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Bes

Bes

Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
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Location
Melbourne
Hi,

I am currently working with a charity in Kenya who needs to improve their networking situation..

At the moment they have a single Internet connection in their office and they want to extend it down to cover a tech centre that will have about 30 computers in it for the kids. I think they should be hard wiring these computers into a switch

They pay about $200 a month for their Internet connection, so a dedicated one for the tech centre is out of the question.

Their Internet is a mere 2Mbps (unlimited data) (Tested and they are getting this, no packet loss, etc). so I know it is going to be slow for the kids, but there is really no other option due to the high cost of Internet out here. 4G is out of the question, as the costs are high, and, again the contention of all those devices using it would be problematic.

I am also wondering if we should have a local caching server within the network to try and reduce bandwidth usage? (Squid) This could be running on one of those HP microservers or even a Raspberry Pi at first!

Currently the router they are using is a Cisco model that looks like it is from a home Internet package, so I am thinking they either need a managed switch in front of it, or a small business router that has better abilities to manage high numbers of requests, QoS settings, etc.

The office (Where the Internet connection comes in) and the Tech Centre are about 140m apart so I am thinking they will need to run either an armoured fibre optic cable, or use CAT5/6 with a repeater at the half way point

The tech centre needs wireless as well, as there are other devices like a few tablets, Raspberry Pi's, etc. that need connections, so I am thinking a Ubiquiti AP should do the job. Would this have capacity to actually allow all the 30 computers + other devices in the tech centre to all connect at once?

All ideas/ comments appreciated!
 
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