School me on enterprise outdoor wireless bridges

[seepy83]

Looking for quick and dirty info. Nothing too detailed at this point

We have 2 buildings with direct line of site and about 700 feet/215 meters between them. We're looking into burying fiber between them, but the terrain between the two buildings has a 300 ft wide 40 ft deep "valley", and burying conduit and pulling fiber may prove to be very difficult/costly.

What kind of speeds do current enterprise-grade wireless bridges provide? Do these follow the same 802.11 standards (so we could expect .11n or maybe .11ac now or in the near future)?

One building has a Cisco 5500 Series WLAN Controller. The other building has nothing at the moment. But we would probably be looking at Cisco equipment.

Radios would need to be mounted outside (steel buildings, no windows).

The property abuts a (very, very) tiny airport. FAA regulations that might crush the option of wireless?

 

[drebo]

Unless you're looking at licensed frequencies, you'll be getting about 300mbps (150mbps effective rate). It doesn't appear that Cisco makes an 802.11ac bridge yet, and I'm not sure of anyone else who does.

If you need more than that, I would suggest you seriously consider Ubiquiti's AirFiber. At 700 feet, you should be able to get 700+mbps and it'll be full duplex. Outside of that, the only way to get faster is to use licensed frequencies, and you're talking at least $10k for the link (avoid Trango.)

At 700 feet, you won't need more than 25 feet off the ground, and that should be in compliance with FAA regulations. You can use http://www.ubnt.com/airlink to view the fresnel and estimate what kind of height you're going to need at each end.

If you don't need as much speed, I'd really suggest looking at Ubiquiti. You can get 100mbps over that distance by spending $90/side on some NanoBridge M5s.

 

[seepy83]

Thanks drebo. Ubiquiti's AirFiber looks really interesting. It's definitely something to keep in mind.

 

[Cooky]

If you want high-speed wireless bridge, you can look into Proxim's offerings.
We have several of these at locations where direct fiber was either too cost prohibitive, or simply impossible (a railroad in between...our real estate department apparently didn't care about IT needs when they leased these buildings).

Proxim's wifi bridges work about 75% of the time...these things are very sensitive; if strong wind knocks them just slightly off alignment, issues start coming up.
We back up Proxim's GigE bridges w/ Cisco's 54M bridges, which work, but don't offer enough bandwidth.