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matteogalet
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Joined: Sun Jan 24, 2016 3:45 pm

Wireless bridge two LANs with two ISP

Sun Jan 24, 2016 6:57 pm

Hello everybody,
some time ago I arranged a small office/laboratory inside my old grandparents' house, on the other side of the garden from where my home is. I needed an internet connection and some file sharing between office and home, but since I was not in condition to easily use any underground tubings to run Cat6 cable, I bough two Sextant G 5HPnD to wirelessly brigde the two buildings. Yes, 15 meters link distance with 200$ equipment. Seems like overkill? Of course. In fact I had to turn the TX power down to 0dB on both sides :lol: 200mbps+ no problem!

Last month we discovered an old, undocumented tubing going from one of the building to a manhole, and decided to finally replace the wireless bridge with a Cat6 cable.
It actually took 70 meters of cable to get from one building to the other, but we managed to accomplish it with no joints at all. One full day of digging the garden in search for hidden manholes, but it was definitely worth it; full gigabit LAN speeds and no more random ping spikes.

The only problem left with my network is that where we live, we have no xDSL provider at all, so the only way to get internet is by WISPs. The only one of them who dows not set the traffic limit to 30Gb/month can only deliver 4mbps.
So I am with this slow (but symmetrical!) 4megs connection. And when you have 4 people watching YouTube or downloading files at the same time, the speed gets really annoying...

On the other hand, I have a friend in the town nearby who has a 12megs ADSL connection, and I know for sure his cabinet will be upgraded to VDSL in few months.
So I am left with two of those excellent wireless antennas, and I thought " what if I link my home-office LAN with my friend's one? So I can have better internet speed and we can share files directly!"

We talked about this possibility, and he is pretty amazed by the thing. So we placed one of the antennas on his roof, pointed towards my home, and started testing out the link.

Distance is 5.3km (3.3miles), elevation difference 50 meters. He lives in open rural area, I live in the foothills of the mountain.
With some trouble, we managed to get a nice signal and 50megs of bandwidth.
I can't be more precise now, since we only had 10 minutes left to make tests, and we both managed to forget to take photos or screenshots.
I promise I'll take some pictures and post them.

By the way, I am now happy with the results, and I in fact using only my friend's connection (12m/1m).
I am gaining a lot in download speed (my conn. is 4m/4m), but I loose in upload.
At this point I would know how I can merge the two connections, so I can get advantages of both (expecially with torrent, since it can use multiple connections and effectively download at a speed wich is the sum of the two connections).
And it would be even better if I can set up two different DHCP servers, so if the wireless link goes down, I can have two indipendent LANs without requiring fixed IPs for the PCs or smartphones.

Since I only use consumer grade router or acces points in my LANs, I wonder if it is possible to implement those things into the two RB911G inside the antennas.

I'll be back in few days with pictures of the setup on both sides of the link and some data about the signal level and speed.

Thanks for reading and I hope someone can help me.
 
jarda
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Wireless bridge two LANs with two ISP

Tue Jan 26, 2016 10:44 am

It will not be easy for you but you will learn a lot. First of all, your and his network should have disjunctive address ranges and you should cut the Layer 2 connectivity on the interconnect to keep own dhcp domains of both networks. Then you will rely on routing rules supported by mangling the connections to keep the connections where they should be. The both sxt will remain in bridge mode and whole work will be done on the two main routers.

I am on mobile now but will come later back to continue. Before that imagine something about the concept of the connections. You cannot send packets belonging to one connection by one wan and receive the answers from another wan. You can just decide what wan will be used for what connection for both of its up/down traffic if it is initiated from inside the network. Start to think how the decision should look like...
 
matteogalet
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Joined: Sun Jan 24, 2016 3:45 pm

Re: Wireless bridge two LANs with two ISP

Tue Jan 26, 2016 11:11 am

It will not be easy for you but you will learn a lot. First of all, your and his network should have disjunctive address ranges and you should cut the Layer 2 connectivity on the interconnect to keep own dhcp domains of both networks. Then you will rely on routing rules supported by mangling the connections to keep the connections where they should be. The both sxt will remain in bridge mode and whole work will be done on the two main routers.
Hello and thanks for answering. I love challenges!
So you suggest letting both DHCP assign specific ranges - by example 192.168.1.10-100 on one side and 192.168.1.101-200 on the other, and then configure the RouterBoards to "know" wich are the IPs on the other side of the link.
Hmmm something to play with...
Before that imagine something about the concept of the connections. You cannot send packets belonging to one connection by one wan and receive the answers from another wan. You can just decide what wan will be used for what connection for both of its up/down traffic if it is initiated from inside the network. Start to think how the decision should look like...
Yeah I know I can't have "answers" only from the same WAN I sent the question to.
What I imagine doing is differentiating traffic by tipology, like BitTorrent on both interfaces (multiple connections), and HTTP differentiated by, don't know, even or odd server IP?

BTW thanks for answering, I'll start experimenting in the meantime!

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