Just like my Home Network Upgrade, my church’s network upgrade has been in the making for about a year as well.

Also getting a SpinTel 50 / 20 FTTC NBN connection, we had decided to centralise our servers and network equipment into a server rack.

Step 1 - Lay the cables

Previously our network cables ran between different parts of the church.
We decided to save on additional cabling, and to move the wires to end up in one central location.

Fun fact: We have an underground walkway!

Step 2 - Get the rack


We purchased a 23RU server rack from someone on Facebook Marketplace for about $40, it was missing the back door - but it wasn’t too much of a concern to us; as we didn’t care too much about noise isolation.

Step 3 - Wiring

Punching down all the wires into the patch panel

Step 4 - Patch

Step 5 - NBN

The NBN contractor arrived for our connection appointment. We got the NCD (VSDL2 modem) for our FTTC connection, and enabled PPPoE on our router (OPNsense)

Step 6 - Populate

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We’re hosting some resources from our partner organisation RICE Movement

We also installed two UPS systems, one for our servers, and one for the RICE Movement server.

Expansion

Our church has very thick brick/cement walls that severely impede the wireless signals from our Ubiquitu UniFi Mesh Access Points.

Whilst it was impossible / very difficult to run a new cable, we were able to use a twisted pair telephone line and a Planet VC-231 Ethernet to VDSL2 converter set to provide a 100Mbit wired connection to upstairs, where the other AP lives.

100 megabits is good enough, as the NBN connection is only at maximum a 50 megabit connection.
And we don’t expect anyone to be doing any wireless file transfers whilst upstairs.

I also installed a spare Ubiquiti UniFi UAP and Ubiquiti UniFi AC Lite access point to provide more coverage.

Similar: Home Network Upgrade