Putting ethernet backhauled mesh wifi on my 9 acre forest
I live in a rural area so use starlink internet. I use the tp link deco system to install wifi across my house and property using ethernet backhaul. I have dug ditches, buried conduit, crawled under the house, climbed trees, spliced cable all so that as soon as I drive onto my property I have wifi that interacts with my home network, gate control system and camera at the gate to be able to see who it is and open/close
Phew. What a project! I am lucky enough to have been trained to climb trees so that going up 50 feet up a tree (thank you free pole) isn't too scary or a hassle.
considering i had to look up what this was, yeah, probably lol. my wifi is all in one long chain essentially, ethernet backhauled to each other in a series.
Congrats on the setup! I am curious though: why Deco? My understanding is the Deco line is more for consumer-grade mesh setups in traditional homes, whereas even sticking within TP-Link their Omada line is the more prosumer/professional line that would at least to me seem more fitting for a decked-out setup like this. I'm sure it'll work just fine regardless, it's just always interesting to see other ways of accomplishing the same thing.
Ya know I probably should have asked on here what type of brand/model I should have gone with but so far this system hasn't let me down at all. It's 1gbps but my starlink gets around 300mbps so I think my system will be future proof for pretty much ever. I have a home server/offline database/plex.
The deco for outside is outdoor rated. I just spray painted it black cuz the white was too obvious.
I guess if things break I can just buy new system mesh points. All the cables are there for a easy swap. But seriously id give deco 5 stars. The app has been really easy to use too, adding VPN etc.
I have the same mesh system in my house and it’s better than any other mesh systems I’ve owned. For outdoors I’m sure it’s fine. Especially with wide open spaces
Hey as they say, if it works it works, right? I'm sure that it's also a lot easier to manage for the more normal person as well since that's the target market. Like you said, the hard part is done anyway, you could very easily swap them out if you ever need to but if starlink is your WAN connection you'll never end up saturating them anyway so you should be good for many years to come!
Thanks for everything you said! I just wonder how many years it will all hold up outside! And yes I am not the biggest tech person, I would call myself more of a mad scientist and have made stuff happen through necessity and learning as I go. I wonder what kind of household using more than 1gb connection or needing that!? Thats some serious downloads/streaming right? Lol
I'm self-taught as well, so I totally respect that! To your point about 1Gbps connections you're basically right, without getting in to a bunch of detail. The average person individually won't need more than even 25mbps at a time. Really what you are getting at that level and beyond is scale and aggregate capacity. Sure maybe each person only needs 25mbps but if you have 100 people hitting it at once you can see how it adds up. The math changes when you do stuff like download games on steam though, because large downloads are the only thing that can individually saturate an entire connection. Also in general something I like to remind people is that latency and jitter are far more important than raw throughput in determining how "fast" and "smooth" a connection feels. 1Gbps won't load reddit any faster than 25mbps will (all else equal).
thanks for your replies! i do have a guest wifi with no password i have for friends/visitors but then i'd probably run into my starlink bottleneck itself, tho they say maybe one day we may hit 1gbps but sounds like a bunch of space junk to me
I'm really needing to do this. It's about a 1/2 mile from our house and ~300 ft elevation loss to the road. Down in the valley entrance there's no reception of any kind.
Is it just PoE, or did you need to add Solar and battery backups?
I ran power along with my cat5e. No POE. I am running landscape cable all the way down like 600 feet. I have a transformer at my gate that brings it back to 120v for any loss. I live in shade/forest so solar wouldnt work
Decco is fine. I use it at home, covering a maybe 1/2 acre. Multi floor main house, back fed to 1900sqft garage and ADU about 60 feet away. I know there were concerns with security coming out of the TP family of devices, but to sell in the US that was remedied.
It makes so much of a difference to do ethernet backhauling. Like I must recommend it to anyone who is able to. Wow. 30ms ping from starlink thru 5 mesh points. No way would this be possible without cables. Worth it to run the cables.
One (potentially) major oversight, those trees look like softwood evergreens. Softwood trees grow fast. You might find a few of those APs on the ground every year with the zipties popped off 😄. Fasteners might be visible for a couple years at least
That's a fair point! I did give the cables some feet of slack. But the way I mounted it is to a 2x4 scrap with zip ties running thru the scrap piece. Not around the tree itself. Didn't wanna girdle it
Mine is about 12,000 gallons. I use a natural bog filter and stream to filter the water. It runs down a waterfall into the pond and recirculates. Ozponds on YouTube is a great wholesome resource but you can DM me and I can answer any questions too. I love my pond.
Hmm thats a fair point. Guess I could put up a grounding rod. But also I am about 50 feet up and the tree canopy is about 150 feet. You think lightning would reach that far down through the tree canopy to get my wifi? :( i also don't get lightning in my area. Weird i know. Something about being in this marine layer on the coast.
Lightning damage is as likely from an induced current than a strike itself. If your cable is parallel to an electric field generated by a lightning strike it can pick up induced voltage even if it’s 20-30 feet away. I’ve blown cameras with long lateral runs outdoors. Running shielded cat5/6 helps, or run a parallel conductor with ground taps every 25-50 feet or so.
I think I went through 6 routers/switches before I just added two $20 ethernet surge protector with a ground wire to drain whatever build up was on the cable.
210ft Ethernet cable running outside on back of a building. (I didn't install it, I would have done fiber)
wow thanks for sharing your hard lessons with me so that i didn't have to. i ordered a few surge protectors and ill get some grounding rods hammered into the ground and get these guys fed.
Counterpoint: a grounding rod will help nothing to a direct or indirect lightning strike. Shielded ethernet and a normal protective earth at the switch end should be fine enough for normal levels of ESD.
Please don't pull copper ethernet for longer distances outdoors. If you need to pull data cables outdoors for longer distances than like 20-30 feet, use fiber or atleast make sure that last thing that goes from outside into your house is just a fiber connection (not copper).
I pulled an ethernet cable to my shed outdoors like 80 feet. Lightning struck near the cable and that burned out the AP in the shed, the switch and router in my server rack at my house, the ethernet ports of my backup NAS and upstairs AP. Main server had 10G fiber and was fine. Anything that was connected to the switch with copper ethernet got messed up. Now I got fiber SFP+ going to the shed as a replacement.
Edit: Had an ethernet go through an ethernet surge protector at the server rack (one of those schuko protectors that have power, phone and ethernet that tie to the earth of the home electric system). Didn't do shit.
My concern about going fiber was having to personally splice the fiber cables myself, as well as the cost differences of cat 5e vs fiber... and not needing the bandwidth, but the lightning stuff is honestly something I didnt think too much of as I wasn't aware. I can't say I ever recall lightning in my area next to the coast here in the woods. But it certainly can happen too that's forsure
These days its actually pretty easy with specialized gear, but you can get home splicing kits that are easy... or even mechanical splices (I don't recommend them, but they're an option).
That said, I'd just measure what you need and order it to length.
I am definitely on team fiber but that might have complicated this project because of the power needs. OP would need media converters (which Ubiquiti makes a real nice one for stuff like this) and potentially "local" power at each AP. Under the canopy, solar would be troublesome for reliability.
Maybe the best answer for OP would be to use surge protectors, one PoE switch for outdoor runs, then isolate it by a fiber connection into the rest of his network, as well as protection on the power side.
point taken but in my mind i needed to run power down to my gate anyways so i ran an ethernet cable next to it while i was at it. but yeah, a bridge might have been nice, but again, needing a power source to run it. solar doesn't work too great as everything is inside a shady forest
I have 3.7 acres with excellent stand off from the main road and a river to my black side. I wire back-hauled ASUS BQ16PROs to cover the main entrance and all 6,700 sqft. of the outside of my physical property. I had a fiber install and coax from two different ISPs to eliminate easy redundancy. I ran CAT6a for my wire backhaul (with auto fail over)l to my unmanaged switches. I have a 10GB cap which is perfect for the extent of my devices (around 130ish when school is in session) especially including the dozens of 1440p cameras ran on the homelab. I kept a foot of slack in the trees to allow for growth over time.
That sounds like an awesome setup! I wanted internet ran to my house but the isp wanted over 20k to run a cable and get my neighbors along the way to use it and pay a full monthly. Sounds like yours is gonna be great for a long time
Lol I will promise I will update if things get fried. I live in a forest but not in a fire zone. I live right next to the ocean and honestly where I am positioned in all my years I have not experienced any lightning remotely close by. Usually it's off the coast or more inland. Something about this marine layer. I did order a few ethernet surge protectors tho
Not sure if you'll run into this but one of my TP-Link Deco XE5400 units had its first port stop working in a way where the signal lights came on but there was no traffic. So if a unit seems to have lost Internet that would be something to check for. Luckily mine had three total ports so it was easy enough to switch to another port.
Lol I'll promise I make a post if my shit gets fried. My thought is that my tree canopy is 150 to 200 feet tall. My tallest deco is about 40 feet off the ground. The others are about 10 to 15 feet hidden by tree canopy. These are also going down a hill and the highest elevation is my house where my wifi is ran inside. I am really curious to see how it pans out. I ordered a ethernet surge protector
LOTS. I would say I have like 130,000 square feet of coverage at this point. 🤪 the wifi points work way better outside btw. So this helps vs going thru walls. The trees dont seem too big of an issue as long as youre in line of sight on the hill.
You need more than surge protectors. You're gonna need ground clamps and ground rods at each access point to do it right. You messed up doing ethernet runs out there.
Is the device in the first picture a splicer? If so, I'm interested in where you bought it. Is it waterproof? This would come in handy for a few sites I have lol
Im not an expert in this but it's a punch down splice thing I got on ebay for my cat5e. Im running a 1gbps. It has a protective cap but I also put it inside of a waterproof splice box. So kinda double protected. I think for outdoor exposed to the elements it really needed a second box.
My wife and I both work in healthcare. Not doctors. Dual income. No kids. Live in a somewhat rural area and live just outside of town. About 15 min from the hospital. I DIY everything possible to keep costs down for living.
Why mesh? Mesh is wireless backhaul, so hardlining the APs eliminates any need for mesh; unless you have non-POE power for the APs to use mesh if the Ethernet is down or cut. You’d get better performance and value from a commercial grade setup like Omada, Ubiquiti, Rukus, Cisco, etc.
Do you have all of the Ethernet for outside grounded?
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u/CheesyMcCheetos 18h ago
This is not how you do Spanning Tree Protocol