Internet in out building

Ashley Williams

Ashley Williams

Ashley Williams

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Joined
31 Jul 2009
Posts
40
Hi guys

I'm after some advice I'm in need internet access in an outbuilding of my house some 40 meters away. Burying a patch cable is an obvious way but it's a lot of digging and I'm not sure how long the cable would withstand the damp conditions. Is there some sort of wireless option I could use. I thought about power line adapters but I have two incoming supplies to the property one to the house and one to the workshop so the only connection would be back under the road in the distribution network! So is patch cable the only way? Or could I get some sort of wifi box which would concentrate a beam of sign at my outbuilding to get the range?

Ash
 
Powerline works ok between my house and detached garage. I doubt the garage power goes anywhere but your house as otherwise it wouldn't be on your meter.

Or a wifi directional antennae each side.
 
What wifi signal strength do you get out at that distance? You'd need a decent router and a good wireless adaptor at the other end.

Not sure how standard cat cable would cope underground but there may be other cabling options to investigate. You could for example run the cat cable inside some conduit to protect it from the elements.
 
You don't need to bury a network cable very deep. It's not like a mains electric cable where is could do someone harm. The worst that can happen is a broken cable.

In fact you don't need to bury it at all. If there's a route where it could be surface clipped just get some external grade network cable (different jacket material) and clip it up. There's also the option of a catenary wire and running it overhead.

If you do need to bury it you can buy SWA protected network cable designed for direct burial reasonably cheaply. If it's soft ground you don't need to do much beyond burying a spade to full blade depth to create a very narrow slot and then push the cable down to the bottom.

If you have line of sight then you've got the option of creating a wireless bridge. Ubiquiti have some decent kit for the task at a reasonable cost.
 
If the buildings have got unique power supplies I'd be more inclined to use wireless, (unless you fancy running a fibre).

I've had an issue before due to the buildings having different power supplies. Turned out that there was a differential in the ground feed, that caused a small electrical flow - it wasn't much but was enough to keep killing ethernet ports on my switch
 
Easy - use a CAT 5e/higher rated cable which is rated for external use. I'd doubt you'll have a problem either way as long as the cable that's buried is one continuous cable and not cut mid-way for some reason.

I'd also bury it in some conduit like a hosepipe as someone suggested or an outdoor rated conduit pipe.

Edit: I'd route it round the side of your garden so you don't have to dig deep otherwise you may put a shovel through it one day in the future. Going round the side won't have to be very deep either.

I wouldn't rely on wireless going that far - it's more worth doing a hard wired job properly as it can be upgraded to gigabit.etc in the future and it's more stable.

Going to extremes - in the far future if you bury it in conduit you simply can pull a new cable through (higher category) instead of digging up the garden.etc again.
 
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What about a wireless bridge?
Look at something like a pair of Ubiquiti Nanostation M5's or similar. You will only get 100Mb but it's an alternative to doing it "properly" with ethernet.

Ethernet would be best, external cat5e however many runs you want + duplicate for each in case of a failure. Run them through a hosepipe and bury them. Bit of hard work but worth doing the job well.
 
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