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Then we went around our development asking if we could "borrow" some of their bandwidth. They graciously said yes and we purchased a couple of these from Aironet:
http://www.aironet.com/products/building_building/ BR340.asp.& amp; lt;p> The distance is about 1/4 mile and we get exactly what the specs say: 11 Mbps.

Of course the only time we lose connection is if a truck drives by (their trailers).

I highly approve of Cisco Aironet and recommend it to anybody that can afford it.

Two I am familiar with are Breezecom and Aironet , just bought by Cisco. If you poke around, you'll find many of these products have Linux drivers .

It's actually Aironet. Now owned by Cisco. No I don't work for them.

IMHO, if you want to accomplish this you need to take a look over at AirONet. From what we can tell this is the best wireless equipment around. We have tested at over 5 miles apart, with the access point using a 12Dbi Omni and the PCMCIA card using a 13.5Dbi Yagi and gotten around 10Mbits. We were also not in direct line of sight. We had a patch of tress and a small ridge that we had to overcome. This equipment works wonders and altough it is rather pricey, is worth every penny.

Edward McLain
Technology Unlimited, Inc.
Birmingham's Premiere NSP
Linux / Windows NT \ Macintosh

I'm currently working in a hospital where there is a lot of wireless networking deployed. The manufacturer is Aironet and it's been working great with no interference with the ICU equipment...

About a year ago I worked for an ISP that deployed this type of connection. It's most likely using "microwave" in the 2.5ghz range using something like breezecom or airolan equipment. They do use spread spectrum but in addition they also use frequency hopping, and the number of hops per second can be set in the radio.

The antenna is normally a 24db antenna, which is aproximatily 24"x36" or somewhere in that range. It may fall under "eyesore" regulations in your community, but if you own your home or your landlord agrees to let you put it up, the eyesore regulations do not apply. The FCC has ruled that any antenna less then 1M (3ft) in size can not be restricted in such a manor. It's just a matter of whether or not you want to make those waves. ;=)

For the connection, the transciever uses standard ethernet, most commonly 10baseT but the Airolan also has thinnet and thicknet connection on it. Depending on which transciever they use it can use a striaght through cable either directly into your machine or into a hub. (The breezecom, for example, has an SA-10, which allows only one machine connected to the radio (You can still use subnets or NAT, though) and a WB-10 which will bridge your network in) Since this is standard ethernet, you can use any OS you'd like.

Basically, no matter which unit you use, they just act like an ethernet bridge. Unless you have your own anternna on their side, anyone who's on the same antenna can sniff each other's traffic. To make matters worse, (Or better, depending on your point of view) if the ISP doesn't have a switch on the hill, you'll be able to sniff everyone's traffic who uses the wireless connection.

As for dhcp vs. static IP's, etc, that's all determined by your ISP, of course, of course.

As others have stated, these aren't really new, just the first time they've been posted to slashdot. Still, the 1.5mbit/s is just theorectical, unless they've found some way to boost the power or they're using a really small radius, realistic speeds are somewhere in the 512K-768K. But it is bi-directional, which is a plus. Great for those who can't get DSL but want to be low ping bastards. ;=)

As for those questioning why some ISP's don't allow their customers to run servers, it's mostly a bandwidth issue. Your average warez kiddie will setup a warez server and max out their bandwidth 24/7 (We actually had this happen to us). Normally mail servers are overlooked it's the ftp/http servers that ISP's are targetting. And from people I've talked to that have used ISP's that forbid servers, they don't check. It's just a legal out should someone start running an ftp server and utilizing bandwidth 24/7. As long as you're not abusive, they usually won't care.

-skullY

1. Go to the Aironet web page.
2. Click on Search.
3. Search for Linux.
4. Notice that NOTHING IS FOUND.
5. Wonder why someone said that Aironet supports Linux.

radiolan

AiroNet

ShareWAVE

Me, I still use POC (plain old copper)