what technology best suits wan sharing between to buildings, 400-500ft apart?

Question

to=two (2)

Answer 1

You have a couple of options -

If you have right of way between the buildings (meaning you can rip up the parking lot/street) you could run fiber optic between the two buildings. You could then run 1000BaseLX (long haul gig Ethernet). Advantage - high speed, wicked easy, no re-occurring monthly expense. Any number of networking vendors have products for this.

If you have line of sight, but not right of way, you can get optical bridges that beam an infrared signal between an antenna type device on the two buildings. I'd have to research vendors of this stuff, maybe Lucent or Nortel would have this stuff.

If neither of the above works, you can get a dedicated line installed by the phone company. Disadvantage - re-occurring monthly expense, you pay for bandwidth.

What you can't do is run a copper wire between the two buildings. When running copper you need to make sure you have electrical isolation between them - this is where the phone companies come in.

Answer 2

If there are any buildings between the 2 you could place a network switch in there to get extended range, but use CAT 6 cables for this. If not you need a wireless link, the antenna would need to be mounted high, preferably directional and with no obstructions between them. If you use outdoor antenna you will get the best results. 2 access points set in extender mode can then be connected to lan cabling via switches at each end. Your internal networks are quite standard.

Answer 3

can't run ethernet that far without a repeater so you'll have to use wireless and you'll probably need an external directional antenna with a high gain. check http://www.wifi-link.com for more info