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Cantennas can have a range of over 1 kilometer even if you build one yourself. The engineered commercial model should do better than that. How remote is your area? There should be a friendly person somewhere in that range unless you're way out in the sticks. You do have to spend some time aiming it though. You run the antenna cable through a wall to an exterior mount (grounded!) that holds the cantenna. Scan for networks, turn it a couple degrees and try again and mark the finds on the base. Engineering geeks would of course put the thing on a remote antenna rotator. You can also use an antenna amplifier, a high-gain parabolic directional antenna or high-gain omnidirectional antenna to extend the range to several kilometers. The record is 304 kilometers, but that requires special equipment and cooperation at both ends.

Me, I can get three open WAPs from inside my house with the standard laptop wifi but that's not anonymous enough.

Cantennas can have a range of over 1 kilometer even if you build one yourself. The engineered commercial model should do better than that. How remote is your area? There should be a friendly person somewhere in that range unless you're way out in the sticks. You do have to spend some time aiming it though. You run the antenna cable through a wall to an exterior mount (grounded!) that holds the cantenna. Scan for networks, turn it a couple degrees and try again and mark the finds on the base. Engineering geeks would of course put the thing on a remote antenna rotator. You can also use an antenna amplifier, a high-gain parabolic directional antenna or high-gain omnidirectional antenna to extend the range to several kilometers. The record is 304 kilometers, but that requires special equipment and cooperation at both ends.

Me, I can get three open WAPs from inside my house with the standard laptop wifi but that's not anonymous enough.

Cantennas can have a range of over 1 kilometer even if you build one yourself. The engineered commercial model should do better than that. How remote is your area? There should be a friendly person somewhere in that range unless you're way out in the sticks. You do have to spend some time aiming it though. You run the antenna cable through a wall to an exterior mount (grounded!) that holds the cantenna. Scan for networks, turn it a couple degrees and try again and mark the finds on the base. Engineering geeks would of course put the thing on a remote antenna rotator. You can also use an antenna amplifier, a high-gain parabolic directional antenna or high-gain omnidirectional antenna to extend the range to several kilometers. The record is 304 kilometers, but that requires special equipment and cooperation at both ends.

Me, I can get three open WAPs from inside my house with the standard laptop wifi but that's not anonymous enough.

You said "locations". A postal Code or Lat Long would help.

Anyway, Just get a Rogers Portable internet modem for a $100 and a Parabolic Grid WiFi Antenna or better and point it to Fort McMurray, AB: Postal code T9H3L1 or your nearest Rogers antenna and Voila you've got high speed!

It's really sad to see future compsci graduates who never really used anything not descending from an IBM 5150

Always thought that was an appropriate model number. You can label me 5150 if you like, but IMO if Linux ever gains dominance in the OS market, look for x86 to finally start fading.

"He got sick of it and relies on Hughes satellite Internet, at $60/month, but he still has to be connected to a phone line to upload to the Internet"

I don't know where he got his hardware, but they haven't supported dial-up upload for the longest time... right on the site they tell you no phone line is used. back when they were part of direcTV long ago they had dial-up upload hardware, but that was almost 10 years ago! http://go.gethughesnet.com/

hughsnet is the worst satelite provider, absolutely horrible FAP policies, it's really only useful for casual webbrowsing... there is an upstart company that uses dial-up/sat inet, and then wildblue which has a 30 day rolling fap, you can download, but if you do too much in one day you internet will only recover a little bit each day... but i don't think their fap is nearly as restrictive as hughesnets, hugesnet doesn't even increase their fap if you get a buisness account!!!!! wtf...

there is a fourth satelite provider, that targets gas stations etc, for sending data to a central database, not sure what that companies fap is, but satelite internet is a crazy space with a lot of retarded FAPS...

Wifi can easily go a lot further, with a few after-market antennas, this company which i think sells them, has a simple primer, depending on the style of directional antenna you get setup can be as simple as using a level, and pointing in the general compass direction.

http://www.radiolabs.com/Articles/wifi-antenna.html

As an independent consultant, I have used the kit found here here to link 2 offices through aproximately 500 feet of thick underbrush in situations where right of ways could not be obtained for burying cable. Setup of the routers takes about 5 minutes.

When I first moved to my city, DSL and cable were not available. 6 years ago I started a job located about 4 miles away from my home, and they had a T1. Turns out my condo had radio line of sight to work. What I did was set up two Linux boxes on peer to peer wireless using Orinico cards since they had the jack for an external antenna. To those I hooked up the appropriate pigtails and LMR-400 microwave cable to the parabolic grid antennas on the roof of each location. After configuring Linux to handle the routing, bam I was the first guy in my city with broadband. Actually, I'm still running on it though cable and DSL is now available.

Now granted this was the old school way of doing it. The other problem was that I was using 75 feet of LMR-400 cable on each end to bring the signal from the antenna to my card. That's generally not a good idea since long runs of cable attenuate the signal, so it's always best to have your network equipment as close to the antenna as possible. But back then that type of stuff was hella expensive - Just between the grid antennas, the cards, the dongles, and the cables it came out to about $600. You don't even want to know what the network equipment would have cost, which is why I ran it on the cheap using Linux.

But now this stuff practically grows on trees. There are kits around that let you do long distance point-to-point hookups, but I don't know where to get them off the top of my head since I haven't researched it in awhile. You might want to start with Radio Labs to get an idea of the type of equipment that's out there. Bottom line is that if I can get a decent wifi signal from four miles away with a non-optimal configuration, you should be able to do 500m as long as you have line of sight. I think you should be able to get away with it for around $500 or less.

http://radiolabs.com/products/wireless/waverv.php

RadioLabs.com has an excellent selection of wireless antennas, coax, and connectors that will work for you.
http://www.radiolabs.com/products/wireless/wireles s-2.html

Also, I agree with an earlier post suggesting the Linksys WRT54G or GS running the SveaSoft firmware.
http://www.sveasoft.com/

With a slightly better antenna and a few WRT54G's in a WDS configuration, you could easily provide both wireless and wired connections in the remote buildings and have some wireless coverage between the buildings as a bonus.

With enough of the WRT54G's in the WDS configuration and using OSPF, you could create a "self healing" component to the network.

G'Luck

Cantennas are the wrong way to go, as their propagation pattern approximates linear, like the yagi designs. What you want is an omni, sometimes called marine, antenna that will spread signal in a plane. If you're in a greenhouse, I'm assuming you don't want strong signal going up or down, but horizontal in the plane of people walking around. Here's an example of one I grabbed from Google: radiolabs omni antenna For about another $30 you can pick up pigtails on eBay that let you attach these to the usual netgear/buffalo/d-link/linksys/etc. accesspoints. You can place them for effective 10Mbit coverage about one for every 2 acres assuming clean line of sight to the antennas and no major obstacles. Note that vegetation would definitely impact signal propagation in the 5.4ghz band.

I noticed that the article lists a bunch of different antenna types. I didn't know what they all were, so I looked some of them up and thought I'd share:

The info in quotes is verbatim from http://www.radiolabs.com/Articles/wifi-antenna.htm l

Omni: (Omni-Directional)
This is a standard antenna like you'd see on a cordless phone. Broadcasts the signal more or less equally in all directions.

"An Omni-Directional antenna would serve as your main antenna to distribute the signal to other computers or devices"

Yagi Antennas
"Yagi antennas were the design of two Japanese people, Hidetsugu Yagi and Shintaro Uda, and are sometimes referred to as Yagi-Uda antennas...these antennas are typically very directional and are used for point to point."

Yagis look like a ladder with one vertical bar in the center of each step.

Backfire antennas
"The backfire is a small directional antenna with excellent gain. They look similar to a parabolic dish, but the gain isn't as high."

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