Need help, multiple buildings design

If you're considering doing this with Cat5 copper (your cheapest option) remember also that the practical distance you can get away with (whatever the standards say) increases as you drop the speed. So if it's just for internet access and you don't envisage much load you might be able to get away with running the longer legs at say 10Mb/s full duplex

Have you considered, wireless access points in the buildings with a wired backbone to support it?

Have you considered, wireless access points in the buildings with a wired backbone to support it?

that's what I was planning to do... have a wired backbone between the buildings, then there will be an access point inside the buildings to provide Internet access. Like I stated earlier, this is a year round camp/conference center so 90% of the computers are laptops. It is also heavily wooded so wireless to all buildings would be almost impossible unless a lot of heavy pruning was done. There is one building, the newest one (still under construction) that will have to be wireless going to it. It's close to if not over 1,000 ft from it to the main office.

I don't know if I have mentioned earlier but their Internet connection is a 5mb aDSL. None of the other buildings are even wired for phone service. They use 2 way radios now.

The only other possibility that no-one's mentioned yet is point-to-point infra-red. This will only work of course if you have line of sight between the huts and it will probably cost more than a wired solution. However for your 1000 foot run you've got a problem anyway; it's either fibre, some sort of wireless link or point-to-point infra red. Perhaps the best thing to do here is get some comparative costs. For the rest of the network I think you'd be bettter to consider each link on a case-by-case basis to decide the best and most cost-effective approach. Finally, there's always a temptation when doing something like this to go for the cheapest option but that will be false economy if the performance disappoints on day 1 and because it's not scalable it soon becomes swamped and useless. Sometimes you've got to give them the hard facts and insist that at least the backbone gets done properly