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Wireless Internet Co-Ops?
einstein asks: "How many other geeks out there are purchasing high speed commercial net connections to the remote areas they live, and then selling access to their neighbors to help cover costs? I know of a remote area with about 20-30 house all of which could access a wireless lan connection to share a 1.5 ADSL connection. I'm planning on bugging the neighbors to see if there interested soon, and I'd like to have some idea if this has worked for other people. So, who's doing this in a Co-Op fashion, and how is it working?" This probably won't be possible with most residential DSL providers, however would they let this fly on their commercial lines?"
I'd be concerned about liability. What if one of your neighboars does something sleazy and/or illegal like scanning for vulnerable servers and r00ting them or sharing tons of music or movies on a file sharing network and the RIAA sends a cease and desist letter? You might get your service terminated because one of these bozos does something stupid.
The above post is an editorial, the poster cannot and will not be held responsible for all or in part for it's contents
I used to work for a backbone company, and I have never seen a contract for commercial connections that do not allow you to resell the bandwidth, so this shouldn't be a problem.
Just keep in mind that if one of your 'users' does something like send out spam or does illegal activites, you may be held responsible since it's your/company name on the contract with the ISP (hence get contracts drawn up for your users who will connect, in which case you'll need to do some type of monitoring in case the cops show up investigating a possible crime).
In other words, cover your ass.
It's better to burn out than to fade away
However if you start up a not-for-profit company, which is jointly owned by the people who want to use the service the ISP probably can't do a damn thing about it.
The main problem you can face is leaching. If possible set up VPN software so that they have to log in with different passwords. If you monitor their usage, you should be able to ensure that nobody leaches or shares the bandwidth with their friends.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Hmmm...well the service comes into your home and into a wireless access point.
:)
Ask the company to show you the connection between your location and the neighboring premise.
Of course, it's a BS answer to them...but I would expect a new TOS real soon mentioning wireless
Grab a old primestar satellite dish and give it a shot, you just might be able to pull it off. A parabolic primestar dish can get you up to around 36 db gain which just might penetrate those trees in your way. If it does not work you will be out next to nothing...
Got Code?
I'm sure that would be a nice goal, but I'm sure the price is prohibitive at that level. For 20-30 houses (even asuming that the all sign up, and all get online at one time) you're looking at a worse case scenario of 30 people sharing 45mb. Even if all of them are downloading at the same time large files from sites that can sustain maximum speed each person would still have a 180kB/s download. To me, that's clearly overkill. Figure at most you're going to have 15 houses sign up, then out of that more than likely only 5-10 using at a time. Now, most residential use is sporatic (web browsing) so more than likely one 1 or 2 downloading any files of any substatnial size. So, even at 1.5mb (about T1 speed on download) the people should be able to easily achieve a 60k download most of the time. Even if 5 people are downloading large files at once you'll still be able to recieve at about 20-30k, which I'm sure is just fine for the cost.
matguy(.com)
When I put the second antenna on the PCMCIA card (15dbi on the wap, 15dbi on the laptop) and it's all of 20 feet away, I see a marginal gain in signal strength. By marginal I mean my strength goes from -82 to -78.
If you're talking -82 to -78 dB then that is by no means a 'marginal' gain. Remember, a 3dB gain is like DOUBLING your output power. Also, get the transceivers a little ways away from each other, more than 20ft atleast, and see what happens. I also highly agree with the other guy that suggested using power over ethernet and getting rid of the coax. You lose a shit load of signal in that cable. You figure if you're putting out 100mW, and then losing say 6dB over 75ft of cable plus the connectors, that's only 25mW into the antenna. If you calculate that out as far as ERP (effective radiated power) at the anteanna which provides 15dB of gain, it's something like 800mW. If you get the transmitter right there at the antenna and don't lose the 6dB in the coax/connectors, you'll have something like 3.2W ERP. A substantial difference.