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If your Dad and his friend have line of sight and if your Dad is willing to spend a little money, I recommend Trango radio's. I worked for a company in town that did rural broadband with Trango radios and they are stable.

http://www.trangobroadband.com/

I would recommend getting in touch with Trango and talk about the hardware needed to pull off this job. I'm pretty sure, with the distance, you would need the Atlas FOX model radios.

New radios can be pricey, so be sure to hit up EBAY.

Good luck!

http://www.trangobroadband.com/technology/point_to_point.shtml

I know of a local ISP which uses this same company's equipment to feed clusters of users in office buildings up to 30 miles away and never has to visit the equipment more than once a month. If you can get a decent pipe within line-of-sight or only one hop away this should feed you and your neighbors. We're going to use it in a few years to connect our very remote vacation home to my brother-in-law's ISDN line.

First try and find out if there is a Wireless-ISP providing service in your area. You can check with people on the ISP-Wireless list:
http://isp-lists.isp-planet.com/isp-wireless/

You may have to be willing to pay for your own equipment to get the signal that you need through the trees to your house. The lower the frequency the better it will go through trees. You will also want to have directional antennas on both sides of the system (grid or Yagi for 900Mhz). There are a lot of options for equipment to do this with.

Canopy, Trango, and Tranzeo are just a few, Here is a link to one from Tranzeo:
http://www.tranzeo.com/products/radios/TR-902-Series

This one is from Trango, probably a good choice:
http://www.trangobroadband.com/wireless_products/m900s.shtml

You will want to get good antennas, here is a 15dBi 900Mhz grid:
http://wisp-router.com/itemdesc.asp?ic=GD9-15P-NF&eq=&Tp=
Wisp-Router can also sell you a coax jumper that you will need to connect the radio to the antenna.

You will want as much elevation as you can reasonably get to install the radio and antenna. Put the radios outside next to the antennas and run quality CAT5 to the inside for your connection.

Now you need to find someone to connect up to. Either an ISP or another person who you can get a broadband connection setup at their location and link to with wireless. Maybe you can get a second Internet connection installed at their location or increase their service level so you both can share it.

If you use the equipment above I think it is quite possible you will be able to get access. This depends on how far you have to go to find someone who has access and is willing to work with you of course.

Good luck!

If you wanted to use a familiar brand, Cisco's Aironet 1300, http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps5861/product s_configuration_guide_chapter09186a008021e5ca.html , looks like another option except it costs ten times as much and I'm not sure what advantages if any it has over the aforementioned device other than perhaps the support you'd get from a larger company like Cisco. When you deploy a network on such a scale, you're going to get people who use it to download movie after movie, so advanced bandwidth throttling (prioritizing certain types of traffic over others) would be key, and you might have to pay up for something like this Cisco device for the traffic shaping. Not sure about that...

For mega long range antennae to scatter around the neighborhood, as with the city of Cleveland which went wireless, have a look at this to learn more about the WISP (wireless internet service provider) deployment and equipment you'd need: http://www.trangobroadband.com/products/atlas_ptp. shtml.
That company sells products that can beam twenty miles (line of sight, of course).

My guess is that their successes are due to having a monopoly over their signal.

With CSMA/CA, a single user is probably going to have success setting up VOIP over any of the 802.11x WiFi standards. However, for true shared-medium environments, you want something that's going to do TDM for media reservation.

I've done some tests with Trango's gear, and was able to shove 5+mbps of data through two of their 5ghz radios while simultaneously holding a call over the same two wireless links (a total of 7 miles one way incidentally). Would I try the same thing over 802.11b? Hell no.

borked the spelling, sorry.

spelled trango, it's not as impossible to find.

Also, with T1 circuits, you are more important to the telco than a DSL, which is just a dry pair and billed much less. In rural areas this may be more important than you think... If you are not too far from a large city, the break-even point for doing a T1 is probably ~12 people willing to pay $50/month and who have Line of Sight to a central point. This doesn't include startup costs, just monthly recurring.

The Magnolia Road coop (from which I am posting this incidentally- I laugh at your puny /. effect) had outages last summer caused by lightning strikes[0] which took out the telco's repeaters.

A T1 outage will get a much faster repair time than average for DSL. With T1, you call up your provider and go through the food chain to get the telco dispatched. With frame relay (at least through Qwest) Enterprise Repair calls you to see if you are available for a dispatch (this is true even when Qwest is not the ISP per se, but just the FR circuit carrier). Frame relay pricing is also not distance-sensitive as T1 is (at least here in Qwest-land, YMMV). It turns out we get better customer service on a FR than T1, while loop costs on the latter are higher!

I mentioned this cam in another post just a few days ago. It looks at Thorodin Mountain, which is a central hub site for our network. This is what latency looks like going across that mountain right now (worst time of five separate monitoring points). This is via two hops on 5Ghz Trango radios, ~ 14 miles round trip:

10 packets transmitted, 10 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/std-dev = 3.425/4.236/6.832/0.951 ms

One moral: stay away from 2.4Ghz as much as possible. Everyone and their brother has a 2.4ghz phone/mouse/x-10 cam that will cause interference. Those times above were in 100's of ms when the links were at 2.4Ghz. We still do end-user AP at 2.4, but channel crowding forced us to upgrade all of the point-to-point backhauls to 5.8Ghz

Mike
coyote at magnoliaroad dot net

[0] In one instance, lightning apparently entered a NOC via the T1, and fried a couple grand worth of equipment in one moment. We surmise it was the T1 because all of the radio gear was kicking. The catalyst switch was still semi-functional from the console, but was showing link on ports even after cables were removed :( In another instance, the same storm blew two different repeaters. Qwest managed to replace one of them and restored service for about ten minutes before the next one blew out (at which point I asked them to wait for the storm to pass). Enterprise repair is one of the few parts of Qwest which doesn't suck!