Imagine if you will....

[Fatawan]

.....a property consisting of a horse barn(large) with attached indoor arena. The office for the barn has the Comcast Motorola modem/router combo. Comcast would not go any further with its cable. About 150' northeast of the office is the main house, which as of this moment uses awful ATT DSL. About 300' northwest from the office is housing for the workers. It has no internet access of any sort. These are my in-laws, by the way. They would like to get the superior Comcast experience to both residences. I think we could run Cat6 through the barn and trench to the worker residence pretty easily. However, it is a minefield of electric, phone, gas, and dog fence to get there. Could we use direct burial Cat6 and just make a 6" trench, for example, and run it over there? The main residence contains a picky sister-in-law who requests no damage to her lawn. If you guys say it is ok to go only 6" down, I MIGHT be able to convince her to bury cable. If not, there is a window in the barn office that looks directly into a window in the house where bridged routers could be placed. What would you suggest for equipment in either case? Also, what would you suggest for a router in the workers residence(it will be wired) to be used as the AP? Would the system perform better if the wireless portion of the Motorola device was turned off and replaced with a dedicated router in the barn office? Thanks for the help. Please ask away if I need to clarify this mess!

 

[CaptainSTX]

Direct burial of the cable will be the best solution. WiFi solutions will work, but forever you will have issues. The only hard part will be trenching the driveway. Put a conduit in for this stretch if you can so if you have to replace the cable in the future it won't be a big deal.

You don't even have to bury the Cat 6 cable even 6" deep. Just use a spade cut a slit in the turf and push the cable in. This is the way contract drop burial crews for the cable company do it all the time. Unless you go a couple of feet deep you don't have much protection of someone gardening cutting your cable anyway.

Do call your utility locating service to mark all water, gas and electric lines.

You may need to install switches at one or both ends of one or both cable runs. The one hundred foot run shouldn't be a problem, but your three hundred foot cable run will be pushing the limit on Ethernet distance.

Remember to install ground blocks at both ends of each outdoor cable run.

Some people may suggest that you install fiber optic, but 300' should not be a problem for copper and with ground blocks you are protected from nearby lightning strikes.

 

[sfx2000]

Run your cables along the same lines as cableTV/electric/gas/water - depending on where you live, 6 inches might be good, 3 feet might be good...

Before you hook things up - get an electrician to check things - speaking from experience, outbuilding had separate service from the main building, and when the guy hooked things up - bright flash, loud bang - testing showed that we had over 200vAC ground potential difference - guy was lucky to be alive...

 

[abailey]

Connection with Cat6 cable is certainly preferred. That being said you could also use a wireless bridge solution, especially if you have an unobstructed line of site between the structures and you can mount the bridges on the outside. How much bandwidth do you need to the houses?

 

[Fatawan]

There are 4 people in each house, doing your standard internet related activities--email, surfing, streaming video, etc. I think we are going to go with buried cable, slicing it in with a spade in the grass, and using conduit under the gravel drive. Thanks for the information.

 

[Cloud200]

I would strongly suggest using fiber for a different reason than range.
The reason sfx2000 stated of a ground potential difference.

If you feel that you want to go copper regardless, then get a surge suppressor on both ends.

If you run Fiber you never need to worry about it.