Networking Between Building

A customer was looking to link two building together that were 100’s of metres apart.  The first thing to consider was the technology to use for the communications – Copper wire would work, but over those distances the loss of speed (effectively) would be to the detriment to the operation.   WiFi was also considered but owing to the topology of the surrounding land and buildings we opted to use a physical dedicated optical fibre connection.

As part of the connection between building we also decided to upgrade their current 10/100 switching network with Gigabit.  This would have a marked increase in communications between their local PC’s and the Server, ultimately giving a better experience to the users and in many ways improving productivity.

What we needed to do is upgrade the data switches so that they had interfaces for fibre, so we found switches that has the SFP Transceiver interfaces, and that would allow us to interface to the most appropriate physical fibre solution. We also wanted to ensure that some of the kit could provide Power over Ethernet (POE) as we looked to connect various Access Points (AP’s) and VoIP Phone without additional Power supplies.

Some of the kit we looked to use can be found here on Amazon:

Link to Kit	Description
	NETGEAR GS728TP-100EUS ProSAFE 24 Port Gigabit Smart Ethernet Switch with PoE and 4 SFP Ports, Grey
	NETGEAR GS748T-500EUS ProSAFE 48 Port Gigabit Smart Managed Ethernet Switch, Blue
	NETGEAR ProSAFE 1000BASE-SX SFP GBIC Module (AGM731F)
	StarTech.com 1m Fiber Optic Cable – Multimode Duplex 62.5/125 – LSZH – LC/ST – OM1 – LC to ST Fiber Patch Cable
	NETGEAR GS716Tv3 16-Port Gigabit Smart Managed Pro Switch, ProSAFE Lifetime Protection,Black
	NETGEAR GS110TP 8-Port Gigabit PoE Smart Managed Pro Switch, 8-Port 53 W Power-Over-Ethernet, ProSAFE Lifetime Protection

The aim was to find kit that was of reasonable quality, as it was a small business, but not high end corporate kit, that would break most budgets.

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