Where to start? Outdoor + Multi-building Wireless LAN

[corbett3000]

Hi Team,

I'm going to be building a network for a 2 acre residential property, and I'd like to use Meraki hardware, but I don't know where to start. Perhaps someone can point me in the right direction?

Here's what I need to get covered with wifi:

1. A 2 story 4500 SF residential building (likely two APs per floor)

2. A large barn / studio that's about 125 feet from the residential building.

3. A pool / cabana area that's another 100 feet from the barn and approx. 250 feet from the main house. This would be an outdoor use.

4. There are extensive gardens (1.5 acres) that might be nice to have some connectivity in. Also an outdoor use.

In the past for the residential building I would have just used a Peplink Balance 305 + some APs, but due to the outdoor / multi-building use case I thought a combination of Meraki hardware might do the job. I'm not just familiar with this stack so therefore my post.

Limitations:

1. 1 Gig down from a residential ISP. This means the ISP will likely only provide a coax cable drop to one location in the main building, and I'll need to build the network from there (i.e. they won't run another coax to the barn or pool).

2. No cell service  

Any thoughts?

Thank you!

Peter

[GIdenJoe]

For the wireless part I would suggest the following:
- Get floorplans for each of the buildings and a general plan for the outdoor area between the buildings (correctly scaled in x and y).
- Try to get some wireless requirements (how much users and bandwidth per user you wish to support, do you need wireless to continue working if one AP has to be reboot or go into maintenance, voice and roaming requirements)

- Then get someone with survey software to try to fulfill those requirements with the Meraki AP's and antenna's available.

- For the outdoor AP's and barn + pool building can you dig in cables towards there for AP's and possible another switch.

Switching
- This won't be anything fancy, try to not cascade switches but stay with a central switch and connect all other switches directly to it.

MX appliance

- If you really really need the full gigabit internet speed you're looking at an MX250 with adv. security license if you want to do some decent content filtering.

- MX 100 will cut the speeds big time with adv. security feats.