Can I bury 400 feet of network cable?

I have a small network in my office. I would like to attach to this network a PC in my house. But my house is about 400 feet from my office across the yard outside. This leads me to these two questions:

1. Can I bury CAT5E network cable in my yard outside without any extra protection? Or do I need to run the network cable inside a small protective conduit such as 1 inch plastic pipe? Or do I need some special outdoor cable?

2. At a distance of 400 feet, I assume that I need a "signal booster" or some such device that will enable network transmission over that distance. What exactly do I need, and can anyone make a specific brand and model recommendation of such a device?

Thanks for any suggestions !!!

 

100 meters

http://www.experts-exchange.com/Hardware/Q_21010013.html

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=CAT5E+"maximum+length"&btnG=Google+Search

 

Make note of using cable designed for outdoors and using surge protectors. Have you thought of maybe a wireless setup?

Can Ethernet cables be run outdoors?

 

Thanks to both SpywareDr and Whiskeyman for your responses. It sounds like I certainly need special outdoor Cat5 cable.

Will any "active hub" work for this application? If so, can you give me a few brand/model suggestions?

A wireless connection might be possible but both buildings have steel or aluminum siding which I assume implies some sort of outdoor antenna on both buildings. Plus I have the impresssion that wireless is less reliable, more expensive, and also slower than wired connections, so I thought that a wired connection would be preferable. Is that not the case?

Thanks for any further comments.

 

Direct burial Cat5

http://www.cat5ecableguy.com/inc/sdetail/27979

Actually the limit is 90 meters per segment.

400 feet is pushing it but I won't say it will not work.

Putting standard cat5 in conduit would not be a good idea. The conduit will condensate and keep your cable soaked.

You could do fiber and 2 media converters.

Media converters are 75.00 each and 400 feet of pre terminated fiber is:

about 400 bucks
http://www.lanshack.com/Custom-4-Strand-Outdoor-Multimode-Assembly-P1242C54.aspx

 

I'd recommend fibre too. It gets over all the safety issues (earth leakage between buildings, lighting strike issues, etc.), and distance problems. It will also support higher speeds over that sort of distance. OK you might not want gig plus speeds at the moment, but you probably also don't want to rerun your cables in 7 to 8 years, when there may be a need for those speeds.

 

Thanks for all of your comments. The tutorial here:

http://www.lanshack.com/cat5e-tutorial.aspx

seems to both ask and answer most of my questions. Thanks to Scott Smith for mentioning this website.

I'm now leaning toward fiber, although it seems quite a bit more expensive than CAT5E but it does avoid, as mentioned, ground problems.

I will be studying this tutorial and experimenting in the coming weeks.

Thanks again !!

 

Heres some media converters.

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/category/category_slc.asp?CatId=203

Make sure your converters and fiber both have ST connectors.

SC and ST are avaible but ST is the most popular.

 

For wireless you could build a couple of cheap cantennas. You shouldn't see that much of a degrade in speeds. The most important thing is to secure your wireless setup.

Cookie Cantenna with Funnel

How To Build A Tin Can Waveguide WiFi Antenna

wireless between buildings

Wireless between buildings

 

Wireless is a good second choice to fibre if fibre looks too expensive or you have problems with accessing the ground between the buildings.

You need line of sight between the wireless end points. Watch out for trees. A tree in full leaf will block wireless, which can lead to some interesting seasonal signal strength variations.

 

Thanks to everyone for your continued comments. One final question (I think): what about running an underground CAT5E network cable, then at one end of the other (or both), having an optical or wireless link. This would avoid the possible reliability problems of wireless (trees, etc), the expense of fiber optic cable, and the ground problems of direct cable connection, since there would be an electrical gap due to the optical/wireless link. Is this advantageous, would such a link be available and relatively cheap, and if so, is there a brand/model name for the wireless/optical link that anyone can recommend?

Thanks again for all your help.

 

I dont see how that would help.You would still have the problem of the Cat5e signal getting weak.

 

I forgot to say that there is a well pit with electricity about halfway between the house and office. It would be possible to put a "repeater" in there and thereby have 2 200 foot cable runs. I was hoping to avoid that since a well pit is not hospitable to electronic equipment.

In any event, would any basic (cheap) switch or router work for the "repeater?" And if this works, would it still be better to have a fiber/wireless link (if such a thing exists - what do you call it?) to eliminate ground/lightning problems? Sorry to keep asking questions about this, but I am trying to avoid buying something that won't work.

 

Sorry for the misunderstanding

. A regular cheap hub (not a router) will work. Alot less than a repeater as well. I would definitely go with fiber as you will not regret it like you will with the reliability of wireless (also slower) and cat5 at the long distance. For lightning strikes, buy an inexpensive surge protector.

JC

 

A pedantic point as its difficult to find hubs nowadays, but don't use a hub in this situation. A hub is just a multi-port repeater. Latency over a hub will be a problem over the distance you are covering. If you connect a second hub at either end of the connection you'll get serious latency issues. Golden rule of network - you can't daisy chain hubs at 100Mb/s!

You need a switch.

Fibre is the best solution. You could do some of the distance with copper and then do the "final mile" with fibre to save some money, but I am confident it would be a poor investment. Also most of your costs will be in man hours rather than actual cable, I expect. Once you've got a cabler on site, the difference in cost in having them do half the distance rather than the full distance won't be worth the effort.

Put a repeater in a damp hole and it will fail. And it won't fail when it's all clean and newly installed. It'll fail when its covered in c**p, and you've forgotten it was down there.

Do the job properly and you won't have to think about it. Bodge it and you'll be kicking yourself for years to come.

 

Yes, that is right.