[AusNOG] Getting a network out of a box...

[Karl Auer]

I hope this is not inappropriate for this forum...

We need to stream from a particular venue that has no wired access in
the space we will be streaming from. It's a cinema, so every wall and
the ceiling is fireproofed/firewalled. Punching holes in any of them is
a big, big deal, and not going to happen for one event. The floor is
concrete. The venue has wifi, but our experiments have shown it to be
poor - one access point, quite distant and through a couple more walls.

The projection room is directly adjacent and through only one wall, and
it has excellent access to the venue's wired network. There are glass
projection ports in that wall, but they do not open. 2.4G reaches from
the space into the projection room OK, 5GHz does not do so well. With
an audience in the space, all with mobile phones, all with wifi turned
on, we are concerned that we will lose wifi performance, even if the
signal strength is good, and even though we will not be permitting
those devices to actually associate with the wifi.

So how do we stream from inside this space to the outside world with
anything approaching speed or reliability? The bandwidth bottleneck
will be the venue's NBN connection, but anything that is as fast or
faster than (say) 50mb/s will do the job.

Right now my best solution - and I doubt a very good one - is to put a
2.4GHz access point against the wall inside the projection room, wired
to the venue network, put a wifi station against the wall outside the
projection room, and run an ethernet cable to the streaming station.

Any other ideas gratefully received.

Regards, K.

PS Mobile telephony is not an option here. FSO might work through the
projection ports, but probably expensive, LOS will be a problem with an
audience, and we'd probably have difficulty with accurate mounts (the
available tech is nailguns and hot glue :-)

-- 
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Karl Auer (kauer at biplane.com.au)
http://www.biplane.com.au/kauer

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