An EPIC Network Install in a Beautiful Location!

oh way too much intro for this one let's take it down a notch [Music] a buddy of mine recently purchased a lake house up in idaho and his internet and wireless situation is not ideal so he gave me a call and he said chris can you come down here and make sure that we have amazing solid wireless internet all throughout the property and i said absolutely i love doing that kind of design i will come out and we will hook you up however it's not quite as easy as it sounds because the property is a long property there's three different structures that we have to cover with wireless and they're at different levels of elevation so in this video we're going to take a look at what he has today we're going to try to design something that's going to work and then we're going to come back and actually implement that design once i get all of the equipment and we're going to do all of that while enjoying these gorgeous views of this idaho lake house wireless installation [Music] anytime we're doing a survey of a new property to come up with a wireless design the best thing to do is to start with what they have already and then build on that if we can or replace it if we have to so we're going to start here by talking about their existing internet right now the internet comes in from a local wireless isp and it comes in from this micro tick point to point antenna right now they're getting about 12 megabits up and down however if you notice look where this antenna is pointing all right so not only is it going straight through those trees there but this thing right here is like a big metal trolley system that goes down to the lower part of the property this is not ideal placement for a point-to-point antenna that's kind of problem number one we want to see if we can improve the line of sight for this wireless isp or come up with a different solution which we will talk about in just a bit from that point to point antenna we're coming into the wan side of this netgear router which my buddy bought just as a stop gap until we can get you know decent wireless put into this place now i will say that this wireless router does sufficiently cover the entire house with wi-fi so i know that if i put another wireless access point in this place it should be good to cover the whole house without additional access points spread elsewhere in the house which is nice this also has a couple of poe injectors that you can see here one of them is powering up the point-to-point antenna that's just outside the window here and the second one is powering up a point-to-point bridge that takes internet over to the back house and here we can see the access point side of that point-to-point wireless bridge this thing works fine but it is not owned and operated by the owner of the property this is owned and operated by the wireless isp so we're going to want to replace it with equipment that we have full control over now this point-to-point bridge goes from here all the way back there to the back house which is probably about 50 yards or so here's the other side of that point-to-point bridge and like i said really simple setup you can see it's just got a wire going inside the house there although it doesn't look like there's any sort of sealant or anything on that wire going into the house so if we replace it we're definitely going to have to fix that situation and here's where that point-to-point comes in on the inside of the back house and as we can see they just have another netgear router back here that point-to-point antenna however is plugged into the wan side of this thing so this router is actually double knotted for the wireless back in this area so i'm gonna try to fix that before i leave but ultimately when we do the final design it'll all be one network instead of multiple networks with multiple uh gateway interfaces so now we have our starting point we know what we have in place today and now we have to figure out where do we want to get to now it's an interesting setup because of the three different levels that bottom boathouse they want to have internet they want to have good wi-fi down there and that's also the best place to terminate the wireless isp connection so that it has a clear view across to the other side of the lake where the access point antenna for that connection exists and also he's going to be putting in starlink as a secondary internet connection the internet that he can get today is maximum 30 megabits from a wireless isp starlink is made for this type of rural location however there aren't really a lot of great spots to put starlink on the property without it looking aesthetically unpleasing or also being blocked by obstruction such as all of these tall trees around here he's on the wait list for starling but we have no idea how long that could take it could be six months it could be a year who knows right so in the meantime we're going to keep the wireless isp however starlink is going to end up down here at the edge of this dock it's got a perfectly clear view north which is generally that way back there and according to the starlink app it's just a perfectly clear view of the sky so ultimately we're going to end up with starlink as well as the wireless isp as a dual wan setup however you don't necessarily want to put the router down into in that boat house i mean it could work fine there but this is a place where they get snow and a lot of snow at different points of the year that bottom boathouse can very possibly become inaccessible so if you ever needed to work on the router you might get locked out of that bottom part of the property so we don't necessarily want to do that but we can put a switch down there so we're going to have to do some fancy work with vlans have each of these different wan connections on their own separate vlans for terminating into the router that we've chosen for this deployment which is the udmse now i chose the udmse for a couple of reasons first of all it has power over ethernet built in so we did not have to worry about additional equipment inside the house and it also provides additional functionality such as the surveillance stuff if he did want to upgrade to that in the future it also can facilitate that dual wan connection so starting from the internet down at the bottom boathouse we're going to have our dual connections feeding into a us lite 8 poe switch which is going to feed a u6 mesh in that boathouse should provide plenty of coverage we also have the option of adding another access point on the exterior of that boathouse to cover the beachfront area as well as the dock which is great that's going to provide excellent internet to this boathouse but this boathouse is about 50 feet down a hill from the main house so at this point we would have internet here in the boathouse but not up at the main house or the back house luckily there's a pretty interesting feature of this property this house comes complete with its own railway tram system to get people from the main house down to the boathouse there's a path too but one of the advantages of this railway tram system is that it already has electrical conduit running up and down the rails it's going to be super easy to just add another piece of conduit and in my opinion the best way to get your internet connection from down here at the boat house to up there at the main house is just to hardwire another connection and run another piece of conduit from the bottom all the way to the top the conduit of course will keep the wire safe from critters and also help protect it from the elements so we'll have a solid cross connect coming into the udmse inside the main house is very simple it's just a single access point we're going to use a u6 mesh i might switch that out to a u6 lr again this is the initial design that we're coming up with but of course things tend to change the more difficult part of this job is going to be dealing with not only the back house but behind the back house because behind the back house is rv parking right which they also want to be able to cover in wi-fi so it's not too terribly difficult to get wireless up to the second floor of this house since there's already a point-to-point receiver right on the outside of the wall so i can just reuse this cable that's going through the wall and put up another point to point that's going to have a small switch and an access point uh just on the other side of that wall inside the bigger problem though of course is how do you get that wire all the way around the back of the house to where they have some rv parking back here uh he wants to not only have wireless access to this area in general so that it can be picked up from his airstream over here but he eventually might want to have another outbuilding out here for rv storage like an actual rv garage in this sort of area in which case we'd want like a point to point and you'd want to put it basically on this part of the house right here either the wireless access point or another point-to-point antenna that shoots the signal that direction instead of doing a point-to-point we might do a 0.2 multi-point reason being is that if we did a point-to-point it terminates into the second level of that back house in order to get cables run around to the back of the back house where the rv parking is it's not going to look aesthetically pleasing there's just not a great way to run cables you know through the interior of the house and it's also not an ideal place to run a cable back out and then around the entire house so instead of dealing with a single point-to-point connection it actually makes more sense in this case to do a point to multi-point with two station antennas one for the interior of the back house and then one for the rear of the back house where we're going to run a cable along underneath the eve of a roof around to the back side and then we can have an access point there that will cover that back part of the property the rv parking and potentially any future outbuildings that might be located in the back of the house so as you can see a lot of this design work is simply putting all of these puzzle pieces together so that you can get your wireless coverage where you want it to be and typically there's always going to be a solution but you have to factor in cost you have to factor in aesthetics as far as you know you don't want to run wires all over the place you also don't want to poke too many holes through exterior walls and stuff like that especially out in an area where it snows a lot so the next stage of this process is to take everything that i learned today and saw firsthand and put it into a design that's going to work to cover everywhere that we need wireless and wired coverage then we come up with an equipment list purchase all that equipment and i'm gonna have to come back here to do an installation [Music] do [Music] [Music] welcome to idaho everybody we have spent the last two days solid building out this amazing wireless setup for this lakefront property and it has not been without its share of challenges so let me take you on a tour of everything that we set up the decisions that we made during the process as well as the challenges that we encountered and how we overcame those challenges all right let's hop right to it because the weather could change at any moment of course any wireless installation is going to start with the internet in this case we have two sources of internet we're going to be using starlink as well as a local wireless isp let's talk about that local wireless isp first originally the wireless isp's antenna which is this one right above my head here it's a microtic 2.4 gigahertz point to multipoint station antenna was located up at the main house whereas i am at a lower out building which is this boat house that you see right behind me right on the lakefront now up at the main house this 2.4 gigahertz point-to-point antenna didn't have really clear line of sight to the tower which exists across the bay here so we wanted to bring it down here in order to give it the best shot across the water like perfect line of sight and all of that plus i spoke with the owner of the wireless isp and they're going to be upgrading to 5 gigahertz very very soon and 5 gigahertz would not have penetrated through the trees like the 2.4 gigahertz did so if we want to get any speeds greater than 16 megabits out of this thing we'd have to go five gigahertz and you couldn't do five gigahertz where the original antenna was placed the process of mounting this antenna up here was pretty straightforward we just moved it down disconnected it i built this little custom mount for it that you can see right there and then of course we wired it all along here and then into the bottom portion this is where they store their kayaks and stuff or in this little bottom portion of the boat house here uh and then it wires in upstairs which we're going to take a look at in just a second after we moved this dish down here it was still getting perfect 16 by 16 wireless internet from the wireless isp which is to be expected it's got now perfect line of sight so he's getting the absolute max that he's paying for but once we get that five gigahertz in he should be able to double those speeds uh for not much more money so we'll probably end up doing that that wireless isp connection is running as the primary wan right now but ultimately it will become the backup wan connection for this property as we have ordered and actually received a starlink dish we're just waiting on the long starlink cable to come in so that we can wire it into the same location that that wireless isp antenna sits and that's another reason why we wanted to bring the internet down here to the boat house as part of this install not only do we get clear line of sight for the wireless isp antenna but we also get perfect line of sight for the starling as for the starlink itself we're going to mount it onto this dock and we had this custom built steel four inch frame as a post built out here on the edge of the dock now this part of the dock out here actually goes away for the winter time so we have it built about halfway down the dock where all year round this will sit out here it's a really solid pole solution and then once we can get the starlink mounted on top of this pole that way is generally north so the starlink will have a perfect unobstructed view of the sky and get absolutely the best signal that it can possibly get once we get that starlink cable there is a conduit that starts right under here runs all the way the length of this dock goes underneath the sand right here and then pops up where it's waiting for us to pull the starlink cable through this conduit right here at which point it'll be really easy to run a little bit more conduit or just run the cable up underneath here and then into the house where the other wireless isp internet terminates as well and here you can see the setup that we have in this boat house now of course we have everything on a ups first because this boat house is not on the main house's generator backup power so i wanted to ensure that in any sort of sustained power outage we can at least keep this up for a limited amount of time plugged into this ups we have the poe injector for the microtic wireless isp antenna it's 24 volt passive and then of course we also have our us8 light poe switch right here from ubiquiti inc plugged into that switch we have the two wan connections a cross connect that goes up to the main house and then we also have this u6 mesh access point that's providing wireless coverage for this boat house we also have the option of adding another access point down here if we want to put one out to cover the dock and beach area now you guys might be saying chris how are you running two separate wands as well as an access point that's on the lan and a cross connect that's on the lan all into this one switch well we did that with some fancy vlan work and i'll show you that in just a bit when we actually dig into unify now in order to get the cross connect down to this switch from the main house that was one of the more challenging aspects of this install in order to do that we needed to make a really long cat6 ethernet run from here all the way up to the main house so let's take a look at how we did that next running thick outdoor rated cat6 cable through a conduit is never an easy job and certainly this was no exception it was the part of this job that i personally was looking forward to the least luckily though we had a lot of help one of our really good buddies darren who's an amazing electrician and also just a great jack of all trades had already run the conduit up this rail line before we got here and he was on hand to help with a lot of this stuff including drilling up under the floor running the conduit and and all sorts of amazing things that i didn't want to have to do myself there was already an existing electrical conduit and we basically just pee backed onto it you can kind of see the conduit piece right here stacked on top of the other piece of conduit that worked out just great and actually was not too difficult to do the actual pull [Music] it's on its way i think i just heard it you got it no not yet all right still got plenty of slack strings still coming through yeah still got plenty all right so it's like almost at the end of the rule roll reel here i'm holding on to it so it doesn't all go in okay uh it's possible that the ball got stuck somewhere and the string was just being sucked through that's possible should i uh start reeling it back oh yeah i got it oh good it got all tangled up here uh do you want me to sort of start reeling it up till it's taut [Music] yeah all right i'm pulling it's already taut right there right oh yeah i can feel you all right tie the wire on all right let me tie this off first so it doesn't go anywhere all right we're good i'm going to start feeding in or go ahead and start pulling but gently gently and slowly all right it's in the hole that's what she's oh i think we just hit a bend it slowed down for a second yeah it should go smooth it's all downhill i put some vaseline on it and there's only 145 worked out quite well didn't it actually did work out pretty well well let's get it actually all the way through then we'll say that hold on i feel like it should be at the end of the dock by now i haven't you got it all right how much do we need to pull through down there or how much more do you want to pull through you're going to do then right where that 90 is it's going to go right underneath you under the deck and then into the house and i would just pull enough to go all the way across to the other uh corner of the house and maybe another five feet more or do you want to have enough to move it downstairs just in case yeah but for the more the better we go go to the corner of the house and maybe pull another 20 feet [Music] working inside a crawl space is never fun but luckily this place has a crawl space that's actually pretty decent so it wasn't too difficult to work in other than the occasional back soreness from being hunched over for an hour while we're trying to do this so here you can see where the conduit comes up from the boathouse this is where it terminates in the crawl space and we also have another pull string that we pulled through with the cat6 outdoor ethernet so that if we ever need to make a change to the cable or pull additional cables through the same conduit we already have the pull string run and ready to go that cat6 then was strapped up to the roof of the underside of the floor here where we had to run it all the way through this crawl space to the other side of the house on the other side of the house we took the ethernet cable out of this vent making sure that we siliconed up any holes that we made along the bottom of the board here up the side of the drain pipe and then in through the wall where we have the router you'll also notice a point to multi-point antenna right there which we'll talk about in just a little bit on the other side of the wall those cables terminate into the router which is in this small lockable for you rack again lockable so that no one can mess with the internet or the cables that we've set up and by far the most challenging aspect of this job was something totally unexpected the cable the cat6 outdoor ethernet shielded cable that i purchased because this property has weather extremes that can get down pretty low historical temperatures have been downed as low as negative 30 degrees so i wanted to make sure any ethernet that i put in would stand up to whatever nature could throw at it but the cable that i purchased was a little bit different than any other cable that i've ever worked with in that the individual strings of ethernet in the cable had a coating on them that was a little bit thicker than anything i've ever experienced meaning that all of the ends that i had to terminate to were very difficult to terminate i tried for literally an hour on one connection trying to get an end or multiple different ends to actually pass through so that i could crimp it down and then test it out properly a number of times we were able to get both sides terminated but then our testing tool showed one or some other cable just not connected properly was giving us all sorts of problems so we ended up calling in the local wireless isp that owns that 2.4 gigahertz antenna down at the boat house and a wonderful guy by the name of aaron came in and was able to save the day and get those links terminated i mean we were basically running out of supplies and this is an area where you can't just run down to the local hardware store to get ethernet connectors to get shielded cat6 ethernet connectors it's just not something that you can get at the spur of the moment so luckily thank you very much to aaron who came in saved the day got both ends of that long cable terminated and we were good to go and here is a look at that 4u rack all in all i like this rack i'll put a link to all of the products that i use in this video down in the description below now the rack is just fine but the fan on top of the rack is annoyingly loud so we just did not connect that fan this is a climate controlled space so it shouldn't really be an issue inside the rack we have a surge protector which will ultimately be replaced with a ups at some point that's why we have some spare space down at the bottom and we have our udm se now he's not using the unifi protect aspect of the udmse but this was a really great choice because of the poe that comes out of the switch as well as the dual wan capabilities having that poe means that we didn't have to have a separate poe switch up here and it's a nice small 1u rack mount form factor coming out of the udmse we have a number of things including our 802.3 af to 24 volt poe adapter which powers up the access point side of the point to multi-point bridge that we're going to talk about next as well as like you know some miscellaneous iot like this lutron light controller and then an interior access point as well as our dual wands how did we take two separate internet connections as well as a lan connection down here in the boat house and run them into a switch before it ever hits the router up at the main house well we did that with some fancy vlan work let me show you how i did it in unify so from within unify network the first thing i did was come over here to settings and then we click on networks now within networks i created two brand new networks that are vlan only networks a primary wan running on vlan id3 and a backup win running on vlan id4 now when you say vlan only network you basically just mean a network that can pass vlan traffic but it doesn't have its own separate subnet or dhcp server or dns settings or anything like that it's literally just a vlan that the switch knows about so that it can pass that traffic you know around the network now that i have my vlans set up i went over here to devices and i clicked on the boathouse eight port switch in the switch settings i clicked on port 7 and i set the port profile of port 7 to be that primary wan vlan id3 then i went over to port 8 and i set the port profile for port 8 to be the backup wan vlan id4 so essentially what that means is anything that you plug into either port 7 or 8 is going to be the corresponding primary or backup when and since those are now untagged ports in the switch those switch ports only carry those specific vlans traffic the cross connect from this switch down here up to the main house carries all of the vlans right so in that case i now went up to the udmse and likewise i set port 7 to be port profile primary when only and i set port 8 to be port profile backup when only and in doing this i kept everything uniform where port 7 down here as well as up in the main house is the primary win port 8 down here and up in the main house is the backup wan so essentially i isolated the traffic from both the primary and backup wan networks to those specific vlans which has now been isolated to those specific ports once i'm up at the udmse it's then simply a matter of cross-connecting port 7 to the primary lan port and port 8 to the backup lan port so here we can see the wan wiring i'm coming out port 7 which is vlan 7. that goes into the primary one which corresponds to all of the same down at the boat house then i have port 8 which is the backup wan this one is not connected yet because i need the rj45sfp to plug into this port right here it's the one thing that i forgot to bring with me so i'm just going to send it up here the owner of the house will plug that in plug this in and then he'll be completely ready to go with both a primary and backup wan connection into this udmse let's talk about the point to multi-point connection for the back house now instead of running a physical hard wire it had perfect line of sight a really short shot and it was the easiest solution to get internet to two spots in the back house we decided to use nanobeam acs for the point-to-multi-point connection and since they're only 24 volt passive we had to get these adapters i'll have a link down below in the description for these if you're interested these take 802.3 af power in and then push 24 volt passive power out they're actually really handy to have i always have a couple spares of these in my network bag [Music] [Music] do [Music] this nanobeam right here is the access point side of our point to multi-point wireless bridge you can see that we also painted it black with some plaster dip now it's okay to paint these devices so they're just not a big white dot on the side of the house that causes an eyesore we use plasti-dip for this one just make sure when you do that painting you're not using any sort of metal based paint that can interfere with the radio signal the access point side then shoots its beam all the way across the driveway here it's about a you know 100 foot shot to the back house where we have two different station antennas picking up that point-to-multi-point signal and here's one of the receiving stations for the point to multipoint wireless bridge again we're using the nanobeam ac we painted it black with the plastidip but we had to use this box here so we have essentially this camera's power connections as well as two poe injectors inside that box creating a tiny small network without the need to have a network switch so from the nanobeam ac we're plugging into a 24 volt passive poe injector the lan side of that injector goes into the lan side of a an af poe injector which then the power from that goes all the way down the side here and terminates to this u6 mesh access point that we put a little service loop into as well as a drip loop painted it black just like the other stuff so that it disappears actually though looks like we kind of need to touch that one up a little bit i'll hit that next this u6 mesh is then out here in the backyard and able to cover the rv parking as well as any additional structures that might end up in this area [Music] right here we have the second station antenna picking up the signal from the point to multi-point access point we were able to reuse the existing wiring from the previous point-to-point network connection that was already servicing this back house and so we reused that wire which was already poked through the wall although it didn't have any silicone or anything so we did seal it up a bit once we were finished and that goes inside to service the sort of whole back house here with wireless that we'll take a look at next into the upstairs apartment through the wall we cable managed this as best we could underneath the the floor trim piece here we also ran power into this little cabinet right here which is where we have all of the rest of the equipment so we delivered a power socket right here and then we have the us8 lite poe switch that is servicing this u6 mesh access point and then we have another one of those 802.3 af to 24 volt passive poe converters for the nano beam now there's plenty of capacity left in this switch for more poe devices or fanning out network cables to wherever we might need them in this back compartment taking a look at our point to multi-point connection we can see here that our link capacity looks really good we've got about 345 megabits to each one of the receiving stations and it should be a really good connection because it's just about a hundred foot or so point to multi-point link going through perfect line of sight so these radios are absolutely bulletproof this should last a long long time let's take a quick look at unify here we can see that currently our we're testing out the starlink connection directly into the primary wan even though we don't have that long cable yet and we can see that our internet is currently down but hopefully that will be remedied very soon looking at the overall topology here we can see how everything is set up according to unifi we have our udmse as the primary router fanning out to the various switches this access point then we have the access point side of our point to multi-point wireless bridge we have our u6 mesh which doesn't really know what it's connected to according to unifi because remember it just goes through to the station side point to multipoint and then into those poe injectors and out to that device but it does not show as isolated it does show as a wired device unified just doesn't know about that point-to-point connection and if we expand any of the stuff in here we can see all of the clients that are currently connected and we're in the process of making sure that all of the iot devices in this house are securely on this network if we look at our device view here we can see that all of our devices are looking really really good the wi-fi experience doesn't look spectacular right now but again that's because we've been doing a lot of testing and switching things around this morning i expect that that will improve once everything is stable as far as wireless networks go everything is very simple we have a secure network that's going to be for all of the iot devices and sort of household stuff and then there's going to be a guest network for any guests that are here now typically for my own house i would have all of the iot devices segregated into their own separate network but this is someone who's using this house essentially as an airbnb and so we want to make it as simple as possible i'm not going to be here to administer this thing all the time right and it's a 10 hour drive for me to get out here so i want to make sure that it remains as solid as possible all right there you have it a completed rock solid wireless network for this complicated lake house property in this stunningly beautiful location what do you guys think was there anything that you would have done differently let me know down in the comments below also down in the description there is a link to all of the products that i used in this video and of course some of those are affiliate links if you click on those links it does not change your price at all but it's absolutely the best way to support crosstalk solutions so that we can continue to make instructional videos just like this one thank you guys so much for watching and we will see you in the next video [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Crosstalk Solutions

Views: 139,621

Keywords: Lake House Wireless, crosstalk, crosstalk solutions, network, wifi, network design, wifi design, wireless network, wireless network design

Id: P-bDxMgvG1I

Length: 35min 28sec (2128 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 07 2022