Can cisco 350's or 1200's be used as wireless bridges?

[Joemonkey]

We are trying to get an ethernet connection to our a guard shack about 300ft from any building on our campus with ethernet. They have existing analog phone blocks, so we thought "meh, lets try it" and punched ethernet cables into the cat3 blocks thinking it may work, then patched to a swtich. Yeah, our fluke said that run was >700 feet so we did NOT get any connectivity as you may imagine.

Our next thought was to use either Cisco 350's or 1200's to form a wireless bridge, so would this be possible?

Switch -> Cisco 350/1200 -> Cisco 350/1200 -> VOIP Phone

OR would we have to do

Switch -> Cisco 350/1200 -> Cisco 350/1200 -> Switch -> VOIP Phone

 

[spidey07]

Use 1242 or if you want 1252. Most if not all of the 1200 series can operate in any mode and multiple modes at once. Like root bridge and an AP at the same time. If you want to do real wireless bridging the 1300 series is nice - high quality radios.

350s are very old and don't have the flexibility or software features of the 1200.

 

[Joemonkey]

Originally posted by: spidey07
Use 1242 or if you want 1252. Most if not all of the 1200 series can operate in any mode and multiple modes at once. Like root bridge and an AP at the same time. If you want to do real wireless bridging the 1300 series is nice - high quality radios.

350s are very old and don't have the flexibility or software features of the 1200.

Trying to do this with existing equipment, we have like eight 350's and four 1200's just sitting back in storage. If I set up a 350 as a repeater where our switches are, then set up a 350 as a repeater in the guard shack, then plug the phone directly into the 350 in the guard shack w/ a crossover cable... should be good right?

 

[spidey07]

Just use the 1200s in root bridge and client bridge mode. Repeater mode is not suitable for voice.

 

[Joemonkey]

Originally posted by: spidey07
Just use the 1200s in root bridge and client bridge mode. Repeater mode is not suitable for voice.

as in... won't work at all? or will sound bad?

EDIT: In any event, it won't work w/ the 350s, further reading shows:

"The ethernet port in the 350 set up in repeater
mode will de disabled. Cisco prefers people
doing building to building to use their bridge
product rather than their AP product and that is
probably why they do that. "

 

[Agamar]

We used the Cisco 350BR series to connect two offices. Seemed to work fine for us (except they only supported WEP and were 802.11B only)

 

[drebo]

I don't really trust VOIP over wireless bridges.

It'd probably work, and if you were going to do it, you'd probably want to invest in g729 licenses, but I still don't like it. Then again, I know nothing about your VOIP implementation and your vendor may have some kind of proprietary implementation already.

The main thing you have to watch out for, though, is latency. The VOIP call is going to use about 150Kbps bandwidth, but when you get above about 200ms in latency, you'll notice some serious call quality issues.

If the only goal is to get an IP Phone at the remote location, you might consider looking into an ATA, such as the Linksys PAP2T. Put those on the close side and run a standard analog cable to the otherside. Those'll work with any standard SIP PBX and can be had pretty cheap. With that, you simply use any standard analog phone. Depending on your PBX, you may or may not be able to get any of the features. On the PBX that I sell and implement, we can offer full transfer, record, hold, call waiting, etc features to analog phones and even cell phones.

Alternatively, if you want a more advanced solution, you could look at something like the Citel Portico TVA, which is effectively a bridge from a SIP proxy server to a digital handset. These will give you some more advanced features, such as BLF, and allow you to tie back into your brand new SIP PBX. The Portico TVA is really a cool device with a lot of features. With it on the near side, you can use your existing CAT3 runs to get to your old digital phones (or buy a used digital phone...the Portico TVA supports a wide variety of phone emulation types).

There's all kinds of solutions to your problem. A wireless bridge might work, and if the only traffic you have is for the VOIP phone, you'll probably be OK...but if there's a lot more traffic going over it, you'll probably want to look into an alternative wired mechanism for the phone. Some spikes in latency are generally OK for a computer application, but for a VOIP phone call, they're not tolerable.