Can You Send Internet Service Wityh Wireless 1 Mile

farmville in the barn —

Point-to-point Wi-Fi bridging between buildings—the inexpensive and easy way

It cost us ~$100 to wirelessly connect 2 buildings across a small wooded surface area.

We tested these TP-Link outdoor Wi-Fi bridges—both 2.4GHz and 5GHz versions—across 80 meters of partially wooded terrain, with great success. — Enlarge / We tested these TP-Link outdoor Wi-Fi bridges—both 2.4GHz and 5GHz versions—across 80 meters of partially wooded terrain, with slap-up success.

Jim Salter

Extending your Wi-Fi properly from ane building to some other is, unfortunately, a bit of a secret art—simply it doesn't need to be either difficult or expensive. The underground lies mostly in knowing the right tools for the job. This is a job that shouldn't involve range extenders or rely on standard Wi-Fi mesh pieces. The good news is, with the right gear, you can connect your dwelling to an outbuilding without either professional person expertiseor a ditch witch and a spool of burial-grade cablevision.

Although the Salter household (current generation) is planted firmly in suburbia, my parents stayed rural when they moved closer to their grandkids. Their identify is beautiful, just it's the kind of home where a riding backyard mower is optional—a tractor with a bush-league grunter is a necessity. Said tractor lives in a befouled about 80 meters from the house, much of which is a moderately wooded grove. And that fabricated it an first-class exam candidate for a little DIY networking experiment.

Our goal in this do is not to geek out as hard as possible by mounting and aiming everything with millimeter precision. Instead, nosotros're simply out to demonstrate that wirelessly connecting two buildings quickly, cheaply, and easily is possible for anyone. In fact, you tin even savour more-than-acceptable results in the end.

Wireless point-to-point bridging

My parents' barn (left) and house (right) are separated past eighty meters, much of which is significantly wooded.

Jim Salter
Left front end—CPE210, with hideaway Ethernet access panel removed. Right rear—included PoE injector, for those who don't take PoE switches already.

Jim Salter

(Ars Technica may earn bounty for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs.)

When you desire to extend a network from one edifice to another, the all-time answer is almost always a cable—preferably a burial-course cablevision, either Ethernet or fiber, laid in a conduit and buried several feet underground. Only that'south expensive. If all y'all need is practiced Internet access in a nearby pool house or barn, information technology's almost certainly overkill.

On the other hand, solutions involving omnidirectional Wi-Fi about never work well. We've seen people endeavour it with everything from range extenders to just splitting Wi-Fi mesh kits upwardly betwixt buildings. The correct answer hither is, instead, indicate-to-point directional Wi-Fi like a pair of kits we recently tested—TP-Link's cheap 2.4GHz CPE210 and 5GHz CPE510 outdoor bridges.

Self-install is fine for short distances

In this shot, we can see the Access Signal side of CPE210 in the living room, sitting on a true cat tree. The barn is visible 80m away, across a small wooded grove.

Jim Salter
Notwithstanding in March, nosotros wait over the Client side of CPE210 through the grove to the house. The Access Point is behind a thick knot of trees on the left; we deliberately mis-aimed the Client at the porch on the right instead.

Jim Salter
In June, the grove enjoys its full foliage—and the entire business firm is inappreciably visible at all. Note that we're still deliberately mis-aimed at the porch on the right, not the living room (completely obscured, on the left).

Jim Salter

The marketing and documentation on these and other point-to-point kits is aimed squarely at professional installers, not homeowners. Phrases like "professional installation only," "belfry mount," and "completely clear line of sight" crop up frequently. If you're trying to span a distance of several kilometers, this guidance is pretty reasonable. Merely for shorter distances, y'all can get a whole lot sloppier.

I've deliberately kept things as sloppy and simple hither as I could. Instead of mounting the house's Access Point device to the roofline, I zip-tied it to a "cat tree" in the living room and aimed it loosely at the barn through a movie window. On the barn side, I just set the Client down on a utility shelf—and I deliberately aimed information technology a few degrees off-center from the unit in the house.

ii.4 GHz vs. 5 GHz vs. fast Ethernet

These two TP-Link kits—and many competing directional Wi-Fi bridges—run on the older 802.11n (Wi-Fi 4) protocol and use a unmarried radio only. Y'all tin can purchase either a two.4 GHz version or a five GHz version. And while it'due south tempting to retrieve, "Oh, 5 GHz will be faster," that'southward rarely going to be the instance.

Although 5 GHz Wi-Fi is technically capable of higher throughput than 2.4 GHz, information technology offers less range and penetration. These are important factors if y'all need to punch through several walls or a pocket-size patch of woods. When information technology comes to this and many other cheap Wi-Fi bridges, the limiting gene usually isn't the Wi-Fi anyway—information technology's the wired Ethernet interface.

Both CPE210 and CPE510 have Fast Ethernet (100Mbps) wired interfaces, non gigabit. That means anything more than than 100Mbps is finer wasted. About people in rural areas should use 2.four GHz for its greater range and penetration. People in densely packed suburban areas may want to choose five GHz instead, specifically for its lower range and penetration—especially if other neighbors' houses are directly in line with the bridge being created.

TP-Link besides offers a newer, fancier indicate-to-point AP. I did not have the chance to test that particular device, but it features 802.11ac (Wi-Fi 5) and a gigabit interface—if you need more than 100Mbps, it may be worth considering. But in addition to some added cost, the CPE710 volition crave more effort to properly mountain due to its physical complexity.

How it all works

These simple point-to-point APs only accept i port on them: a 100Mbps Ethernet interface, hidden backside a atmospheric condition-resistant access console. That single interface provides the access point with both ability and data.

If you have a Power over Ethernet (PoE) switch already, y'all tin can utilise it to feed your AP merely like yous would a camera or other device. If y'all don't have a PoE switch, you lot can just use the PoE injector included with the CPE210/CPE510 instead—the injector has one Ac power plug, one "Data" Ethernet port that you plug into your network, and i Power + Data Ethernet port that goes to the AP.

On the remote side, things work just the aforementioned. You use either a PoE switch or the included injector to power and feed the access point. If you're using the injector, the "Data" port can be plugged into a single device directly or plugged into a switch to feed a whole network.

Although TP-Link's bridges support connecting client devices—east.g., laptops, phones, and tablets—to them directly, I don't recommend doing then. Configuring multiple devices to use the aforementioned Wi-Fi band and channel as the bridge APs do volition have a severe bear on on the betoken-to-point link quality.

If you're wondering how to go "whole barn Wi-Fi," it's uncomplicated—connect a Wi-Fi Access Point similar TP-Link's EAP-225 to the output of the bridge. If you configure it to have the same SSID (network name) and countersign you'd apply to connect at your house, your devices volition fifty-fifty automatically roam to either side of the link.

If you're using Wi-Fi mesh such equally Eero in your main house, you may not want to use the standalone access point approach outlined above. Instead, bring i of your mesh kit'due south nodes out to the befouled or guest house and plug its Ethernet interface into the CPE210/CPE510. The Eero node will consider itself continued directly to its mesh siblings by wire, and everything volition "just work" as though the befouled Eero was nevertheless a house Eero.

Configuration

On the Access Betoken side of the link, we create a new SSID and password...

Jim Salter
... and on the Client side, we connect to the new SSID we created on the Access Point side earlier. (Cheque out that 19dB SNR increase compared to the firm's Eero network!)

Jim Salter
Once Access Indicate and Client are connected, we get a dainty, data-dense status page.

Jim Salter

The TP-Link bridges I tested use TP-Link's "Pharos" configuration interface. To log in to a brand-new Pharos-powered span AP, you will need a laptop or PC with Ethernet interface, which you'll plug into the aforementioned network as the bridge unit of measurement. (On the remote side, you'll plug directly into the "Data" port of the AP's power injector.)

Subsequently temporarily giving your PC a static IP address in the 192.168.0.10 subnet—for example, 192.168.0.10—y'all browse to the AP's factory default IP address at http://192.168.0.254/. Subsequently a default admin:admin login, y'all'll be prompted to select a new username and countersign, so led into a Quick Setup wizard.