Industry Forums > Wireless Service Providers > Need to locate cpe 500-600ft from house/power, options?

Need to locate cpe 500-600ft from house/power, options?

raytaylor used a length of barbed wire fence.

Anyway, what I had to do once was run CAT5 and lock the network devices to 10 Mbps, then ran some 18 ga wire for power.

reply to popcorrin
Strained fencewire is awesome stuff.
At the bottom is a laptop power supply (19v, 3amp) and it feeds + onto 12 gage fence wire, and - into the spare pairs of a cat5 cable attached to the fence wire.

Every 90m, a cheap 12v 5 port network switch is connected into the data pairs so that it repeats the ethernet signal.

In total this goes 250m

Here is some pics:

On the other side of this pole is one of the boxes i put the ethernet switches into.


Its much tidier now, and the nanostation is mounted on a sat dish mounting arm. The pole has been on that angle for the last 20 years, so when i climbed up and started swinging around, it seemed pretty sturdy.


The view down to the house from the top.
The tower is on the hill in the top left near the grey sky.

I have also just completed another project where I ran 550m (1,700 ft) and I used a 35v 5amp power supply at the bottom, and used two cat5 cables inside some polythene hose attached to a farm fence. One cat5 cable carries + and the other carries -. At the top of the hill is a 5 port 12v hub, 2x Loco 5M's and a nanobridge 5M. The voltage at the top of the hill is 23.5v and a voltage regulator drops it down to 17v so it doesnt rise too high and blow the radios.

Edited to add - the 550m run doesnt have ethernet going down it. But i believe that If i didnt have the nanobridge, there would still be enough power at the top to run one of the two loco's, a network switch and a VDSL ethernet extender. Then I could use one of the twisted pairs inside the cat5 cables to transport the data back down the hill - but in this case it was cheaper to install a loco cpe on the power supplier's house and give him a free 256k connection.
I tried to do this long run using 2 of the fence wires for + and 2 for - but there was too much resistance, so I wouldnt use fencewire/cat5 for anything longer than 300m, and 2x cat5 for anything longer.

My bad...didn't know if it was barbed wire or not, but I know it was fence wire. Wonder if electric fence wire would work? I buy that by the mile, as I sit here thinking of when the cows touch their nose on an electric fence and watch them snort and jump back.

I bought just the standard fencing wire, but i believe electric fence wire is specially designed to be high tensile and they also give it an ohms rating per km, so you can calculate exactly what the voltage drop will be. But i have never investigated it further because its a little more expensive.

reply to popcorrin
Thanks for responses.
And by the way that is beautiful countryside.

reply to popcorrin
That is an aweful long run for such small wire. I was told in another thread that it would not go that far. I was looking at using phone wire / ethernet wire / 18 guage wire, something that is cheaper than heavy guage electric wire to run the wire at least a few thousand feet.

Was you using all 8 wires in the ethernet wire connected together to run the electric on to power the AP or just two of the wires? This is something that I would like to do in a few areas.

reply to popcorrin

reply to mountain top

reply to superdog

reply to popcorrin

reply to popcorrin
New Zealand or Australia maybe?

I think neatness counts for a lot. Is trenching not an option? What about a solar station?
I'd probably just tell the end user they are going to have to spring for a solar setup. It'll cost in hundreds to get something decent.
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reply to lutful

said by lutful:

said by popcorrin:

west side of their property line is high enough to receive a signal. The only problem is that it is located 500-600ft from a power source.

Option #1: Buy a pair of 85mbps homeplug modules from any computer store - they usually come pre-configured to talk to each other. Buy some outdoor AC cable and 2 plastic enclosures ... you can figure out the rest.

Option #2: A PoE repeater in the middle but they are usually designed for 48V.

reply to popcorrin
In the pictures, the fence wire carries the + and inside the cat5, 4 of the wires or 2 pairs carry the -. The other 2 pairs carry the data. 1 radio at the end, and 2x ethernet switches along the way.

I made sure that the fencewire carried the + because the electrons come from the - side, and rain would eventually corrode the fence wire if it were negativley charged. I think.

On the longer project where i didnt use fencewire, i used all 8 wires for - in one cable, and all 8 wires for + in the other cable. Although at the end, its running 3 radios over 500m away.

Notes on above
- Fibre - you still need to run power to the other end
- Homeplugs - where i live, you must be qualified if you want to run high voltage in such a way (its 240v) around here. Plus the losses over standard wire may still be too much.

- Trenching - in my project with the pictures, there is coax wire buried under the ground for the old tv antenna next to the nanostation but its about 30 years old and in such bad condition that i couldnt be bothered with it. Was just easier to tell the farmer that i will come back when he has put in 3 or 4 poles and wants to help me strain it up. Trenching wasnt really an option for me because i couldnt be bothered.

- Looks - you cannot see the cat5/fence wire running up the hill from the street in the bottom picture behind the house, although you can see the power lines runnning along the road from here. Because the cat5 is black it blends in well.

The location of the pictures is near Maraetotara, New Zealand

reply to superdog

Looked at the cable you use for house wire - running from the switchboard to the power socket, and it was going to be about NZ $600
Plus I would have had to get hose to shield it from the sun or protect it if we trenched it.

The cost of the fence wire was about NZ $50 and 250m of UV rated outdoor cat5 was $250. Maybe $20 for UV rated cableties and $50 for a couple of ethernet switches.

Problem with using house wire, would have also been the question of how to get that signal back down to the house. Another pair of Loco radios adds on another NZ $240
So the cat5 cable avoided this also.

I wonder if outdoor low voltage wire (like used for landscape lights) would work for this distance. RipTaylor I fully understand that what you are able to buy locally is probably much more limited that what I can do in Texas. But I am also wondering what the other options would be.

reply to raytaylor
Thanks for the responses. Lot of good ideas here.

By the way I was just joking about the cat 5 ruining the view.

Note to self: need to visit new zealand

reply to robbin
Im just trying to think what the AWG rating of garden wire is. It would probably work well. Although you are right that around here things are much more expensive. Cat5 cable is made in such huge quantities now that it just happened to be the cheapest i could find.

4 of 8 wires inside a cat5 cable work out to be equiv to an AWG 18 wire, which is 7.15 ohms per 300m. At 0.5 amp at the other end, the total voltage lost would be 7.15 volts.

8 of 8 wires inside a cat5 cable (so you need 2 cat5 cables) work out to be almost an AWG 16 and voltage lost with 0.5 amps being used at the other end would be 3.6 volts

reply to raytaylor