I'm working through a tricky situation getting a field office set up out in a very rural area. There are ten 12' x 60' trailers being set up (2-3 metres apart from one another), each with varying amounts of staff working during the day (40-50 people total). There is no landline internet (cable / DSL / fibre) available, so we are forced into selecting LTE or Satellite services for our primary connection.
At present, we have a 100ft cell tower / booster in place, so the field yard is bathed in LTE signal (~25/5 mbps). The office administration has ordered ten LTE hubs, one per trailer, which each have three LAN ports and will broadcast a WiFi signal as well.
Now - the tricky part.
Project administrators have asked me to install a network for the office, with a few requirements:
1) Must be able to print to network-connected printers in the trailers, though not every trailer has one. May need to send jobs to the next building over, or someplace else.
2) All ten trailers must be able to access the temporary file server in place (a QNAP T-251+) by mapping the network drive in Windows / Mac (SMB)
3) The network must provide internet service as well such that the QNAP can back up its files to online storage; it is not an option to build a local-only network that people have to jump between when accessing the print/file equipment or the internet.
Obviously, this isn't an ideal setup, as each of those LTE hubs functions as its own router / network, and I have yet to find a ten-port load balancer that would be viable within the scope of this project. Has anyone run into this kind of challenge before and managed to come out the other side of it with one, cohesive network? I've been told to look into smart / managed switches that can run through some L3 routing capabilities of their own, but I'm not quite sure how to tie the whole thing together.