Greg's Technical Blog

Long Range WiFi Solution

Do you ever wish you could extend your company network across the parking lot?  Across town?  With solutions from EnGenius Datacom you can!  I just completed a project for one of my clients who needed to extend their network across the parking lot.  They already have 2 buildings on the property networked together but, in that case, they had been able to run cables underground to facilitate the connection.  Now, wanting to connect a 3rd building about 200 cable feet away proved to be more challenging because there was no conduits under the parking lot.  Since trenching would be quite costly I decided to look at a wireless solution.  EnGenius products were recommended to me so I took a look.  After calling their sales team I was directed to the EOC-2610 device.  I purchased 2 of these from CompUSA for a very reasonable $68 each (I got a $1 non-profit discount because of my client's tax status... sweet).

For physical installation of the devices I relied on the my client's maintenance staff.  The EOC-2610 comes with a hose clamp style mounting system that easily clamped on to a custom bracket that was attached to each building.  Power and network connection are delivered to the devices via their PoE interface.  The PoE injector and A/C adapter are included with the devices.  Since they were mounted outdoors, I used direct burial Category 6 ethernet cable to reach the devices.  Once the cable came inside the building I terminated it and continued to the indoor switches with standard Category 5e cable.

Implementation was fairly painless once I deduced the appropriate operating mode for the devices.  The devices can be configured via web console in 4 modes: Access Point, Client Bridge, WDS Bridge and Client Router.  For the main building I chose Access Point (AP) and for the remote building I chose Client Bridge.  Once this was done I created a wireless network on the Access Point and enabled WPA2-PSK/TKIP security.  To connect the AP and the bridge I logged into the web console on the bridge and all I had to do was scan for networks.  Once it found the network I wanted (and it found a bunch!) I could then connect with the appropriate passphrase (set from the AP's wireless config). In the remote building I installed a 24 port switch that receives the up-link from the bridge and then allows me to operate wired PC's and printers within the remote building.

So far I am very satisfied with this solution.  The EnGenius website says this device can transmit up to 30km or 18+ miles.  I am not sure about the total range, but it does work great for the distance I needed to cover.

Pros:
-Easy installation/configuration
-Long range and strong signal
-Cost effective

Cons:
- I would like to have had a MAC filtering option so that I could limit the devices that can connect to this signal (limiting wardriving)

Project Pictures:

Remote building device

Main building device

Backside of main building device, showing mounting bracket