3

I'm facing a technical challenge and could really use your expertise. I need to establish a wired network connection between two points 140 meters apart - well beyond the standard 100m limit for Ethernet.

Key Details:

Outdoor installation (connecting two separate buildings) Requires stable, reliable bandwidth Must be wired (WiFi isn't suitable for this application) Looking for real-world experience:

Has anyone successfully implemented a similar long-distance run? What solutions actually worked in practice? Any pitfalls or lessons learned I should know about? I'm especially interested in hearing about what's worked (or failed) for others in field deployments.

Thanks in advance for sharing your knowledge!

PS: I'm aware fiber is an option, but curious about other approaches that might work with just rj45 cables.

New contributor
m.Reda is a new contributor to this site. Take care in asking for clarification, commenting, and answering. Check out our Code of Conduct.
3
  • Do you actually have a reason to avoid fiber, or do you just feel that fiber is more complicated or more expensive than copper? That's no longer the case for at least a decade (thanks to cheap off-brand transceivers on the market), at 100m+ fiber is going to be cheaper, easier to set up and maintain, and more reliable than copper.
    – TooTea
    Commented 22 hours ago
  • What minimum speed do you require? DSL point-to-point modems over copper might be adequate, if you can't get 10 Mbit ethernet to work..
    – Criggie
    Commented 11 hours ago
  • @TooTea I'd be worried about pulling a pre-terminated fibre cable for that distance - the friction of dragging through conduit/piping might damage it, but a draw cord taking the tension and taping the fibre to the draw cord every 5-10 metres should work. Terminating plain fibre is still not really possible for the hobbiest. Hobbyist.
    – Criggie
    Commented 11 hours ago

5 Answers 5

7

Ethernet links beyond 100 m is only possible with fiber variants.

Depending on the required link speed, 1000BASE-SX or 10GBASE-SR over multi-mode fiber are probably the most common options.

If you require more bandwidth now or in the future I'd seriously recommend starting with single-mode fiber, which doesn't add much cost, if at all (using 1000BASE-LX, 10GBASE-LR, 40GBASE-LR4, ...).

Of course, there are several non-IEEE options for transmitting Ethernet over copper over more than 100 m, but many are proprietary or hard to get - keep in mind that you might need to replace components after a couple of years and exotic hardware might be hard to get then.

6

Ethernet has 100 m reach per segment. They make PoE-powered repeaters or extenders which are essentially two-port switches. Of course, you can use a normal switch in the middle.

2
  • Of course installing any sort of active gear in the middle of an outdoor run might be quite complicated, as that middle spot is likely to be buried or exposed to the elements.
    – TooTea
    Commented 21 hours ago
  • 1
    @TooTea: True, but something like mikrotik.com/product/gper seems like it would be relatively easy to protect – doesn't have to be a whole box with powered switch.
    – grawity
    Commented 18 hours ago
4

While you might find a combination of gear that will work beyond spec, you're just asking for trouble in the future. In fact, there's a surprising amount of gear that won't drive 100m - takes a lot of power, and more sensitive receiver. There are DSL (VDSL these days) "ethernet bridges" that can easily span that distance, but they're going to be slow (~100Mbps), and increasingly hard to source.

As Zac has already said, fiber is always the answer. Future proof your installation with single-mode, and more than one pair. I highly recommend installing conduit between the buildings; it gives more options for the cable, and options into the future. (be mindful of elevation... we created a water spout in one of our offices.)

Fiber is immune to lightning (and to a degree, water), and will not create electrical/ground loops. However, direct burial stuff often contains a steal tracing wire.

(I've used SDSL devices in a pinch. But that was decades ago, and it tops out at 2Mbps.)

2
  • also fiber is cheaper per meter Commented yesterday
  • @SimonRichter true - but termination is much more expensive, both in the action of fitting a plug and the active gear required.
    – Criggie
    Commented 11 hours ago
2

My personal experience is very similar to yours. I had a building about 150m from the base building to which I ran Cat 6e and fibre underground, with the expectation that I would need the fibre connection to get any decent throughput. However thanks to delays in getting the fibre terminated, I started with just the Cat 6e. 18 months later I'm still using just the Cat 6e (as it happens because I'm in a rural area it's been hard to get someone to come out and terminate the fibre for me) and I'm having no problems transferring files to and from computers at speeds close to 1000BASE-T (typically around 800Mb/s). The cable runs between two switches (one Dell and one Ubiquiti).

Having said that I have been pleasantly surprised that it works, and wouldn't recommend using copper cable over that distance, especially for mission critical applications. If you're running cables from scratch, run fibre.

New contributor
Nick is a new contributor to this site. Take care in asking for clarification, commenting, and answering. Check out our Code of Conduct.
1
  • You're lucky - it "shouldn't" work because its over specified distance AND because no provision was made for phantom or induced AC on the wire by the two ends potentially being on different phases. I've managed 140 metres at 10 Mbit, and ended up putting a 100 Mbit hub in the middle to get the speed back (early 2000's)
    – Criggie
    Commented 11 hours ago
1

Long ago, when 10BASE-T and 10BASE-2 were a thing, every packet was broadcast over the whole network. Hubs (in 10BASE-T) were only repeaters and in 10BASE-2 the cable was the hub itself. Switching hubs (now only called "switches") happened later.

In order for a broadcast-only network to work properly, one needs an upper limit of the propagation delay in order to deal with the packet collisions. This was arbitrary decided at 100m and the physical layer was engineered around this.

Well, it is not that everything worked at 100m - low quality cables and gear usually constrained the networks at lower size.

When the switching hubs started to pop up here and there, the propagation time was no longer an issue. The limiting factors became the signal attenuation and the noise pickup over the length of the cable. With high quality hardware and some luck one could run almost 200m segments. I have some experience in neighborhood-sized LANs where segments of up to 160m running reliably at 100MBit/s were a common practice.

While I never did myself this at 1000MBit/s, there is no reason why this should not be at least tried.


Well, the propagation delay assumption is not completely abandoned these days. You may have to play with the flow control settings.

1
  • Using the 5-4-3 rule for 10 Mbit/s Ethernet, you can extend an Ethernet L1 segment to up 1500 m using 10BASE5. With HDX links, collision sensing is another parameter you have to consider. With FDX links, it's about attenuation, lane skew and crosstalk which limits a link to 100 m for TP variants, using standard components. There's a lot more leeway in 100BASE-TX than there is in 1000BASE-T, so I'd be very surprised to see a flawless 160 m link there.
    – Zac67
    Commented 22 hours ago

Your Answer

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge you have read our privacy policy.

Start asking to get answers

Find the answer to your question by asking.

Ask question

Explore related questions

See similar questions with these tags.