Have you ever been faced with the situation in which an existing department in your organisation needs to relocate to another building in the same vicinity? You might think it's not a problem -- you can just run fibre to it. There is a catch, however: the building to which they are relocating is being leased.
You may not want to spend the funds to bring fibre to a location that you don’t own or that may only be in use temporarily. What are your choices -- DSL or cable? It's possible in a few cases, but for a large department with many users, such a small pipe would not be enough. Leased line or frame relay can work and is often the choice in these cases, but it does come with a monthly fee. WLAN has its own issues, including distance limitations, interference, and security.
So what else can we pull from the bag of tricks? How about wireless bridging? Before you start cringing, wireless bridging has come a long way in the last few years and can be a viable option in place of another WAN connection.
Wireless bridging
Wireless bridging is not a new concept and has been available for several years. However, in its first incarnations, wireless bridging was not necessarily easy to set up and maintain, and reliability could be variable. Because of this, many IT administrators did not consider it when planning the infrastructure. This is unfortunate, because for every horror story, there was probably a success story that was never heard. I implemented a 10-Mbps microwave connection about five years ago that ran without a hiccough for several years until it was no longer needed -- long enough to pay for itself more than twice.
Needless to say, technology has advanced dramatically from the 10-Mbps days and can now reach speeds from 100 Mbps to 1.2 Gbps. Let’s take a look at the different types and compare their features.
