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Wireless Dilemma at Newton's House?
"The alternative approach just seems silly:
Proposed: Add another 128k ISDN line and 2 ordinary phone lines in one building (for office use) install 2 phone lines in another building (for other use) and continue using the existing 128k line in another building (used for free public internet access) - the network option would come from using the Internet and a VPN (the 4th building wouldn't be connected in this scenario). Hard line (cabled) ethernet cannot be used as it will be both be too expensive and involve digging underground which is not allowed.
Being a charity, The National Trust (the owners) aren't going to invest in some experimental wireless kit that might not work. But surely someone out there in the Slashdot community can help to ensure that it will. It must be possible, surely?"
is a possible solution ....
If there are existing phone lines, is it not possible to set up some sort of VPN over DSL that does not require the addition of more phone lines?
... why does this historic place need to be networked? :)
Also
the blood has stopped pumping, and he's left to decay
the me that you know is now made up of wires
The signal should be able to go through the walls, albeit not as strongly.... A 1Mbit link isn't horrible :)
use wireless inside , and cable outside
T'aint cheap, but maybe a laser to laser connection set up between buildings. You should only have to point the access points out the window at each other.
Don't such buildings usually have some kind of metal moulding somehwere on the outside (along the roof, etc), or a wheathervein? You could connect your antenna to that, I guess.
Also, just putting the antenna in a window with a line-of-site to the target building might be good enough.
external antennae or high gain aerials...they should work as long as you have line of sight..
Ahh... its England... must be Yards...
either way.. just toss a few linksys boxes in there tucked out of the way and you should be all set, depending on line of site between buildings. The spec is good to 300ft on standard gear. THough with stone walls, you may need to place the AP near a window to get enough signal through.
If you can run your own copper DSL dry pair should be an option.
I'm much funnier now that I'm a subscriber.
Do you have Line of Site?
Can you setup access points in the windows, disguish the antennas among the flowers?
A good directional antenna should be able to cover 100m without too much problem...
Now how thick is the bloody glass?
Tournament Management Online &
I know there were several companies in seattle that were working on line of sight/laser tech stuff, but couldn't you also have directed antennae that point from inside windows across the way?
hmmmm?
If a half dozen cubicle walls can drop WiFi to background noise, I have _no_ _idea_ what stone walls would do.
Can you beg borrow or steal a 2.5 Ghz cordless phone and see how well it works?
As far as exposed antennae, 802.11 basestations get along with 6" antennae. My unit works a good 1500 feet out the back of my house (wood structure) the unit sits on top of the Fridge, and there are quite a few windows on that side of the house.
Place the basestation on somebody's desk with a good view of the other buildings. I'll bet it'll jump the gap.
A card is less than $100, a Basestation is less than $180(us), have some fun running aroung the campus with netstumbler, it's good for a few days exercize.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
When will people get it into their heads! This is a historical site.
Use the correct solution for the problem, people!
Strap packets to the legs of carrier pigeons and get them to transmit the information between the buildings.
--
Employing incompetence: $35/h
Fixing the resulting mistakes: $1000's
Employing me: Priceless
This sounds like a job for RF1149.
No need for antennas, just an open window.
"People that quote themselves in their signatures bother me" - athakur999
How about weaving some conducting material such as thin, bare copper into the roofs, also a good antenna inside the house (even if its brick or stone should work). The best way to tell is just to see how good standard radio reception is within the structure. If its very bad, then wireless may not work, but if its ok, the buildings are most likely close enough to not need external antennas, that would only be needed if you were using line of site wireless access, but even in that case antena material could be woven into the roof to give access.
Check my site out for ogg vorbis music produced with linux.
If not, could you set up two wireless access nodes _outside_ the building (again in some discreet location), and then run cable from each into the respective buildings?
Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
Why not use a standard antenna which can be hidden within the natural surroundings of the building.
There are many styles of antenna that do not look like radio, or satellite.
There is also the possibility of using a smaller directional antenna that can be placed within an office within line-of-site through a window.
IP Over Apples Falling From Trees. I'd have to look up the RFC -- I don't have it handy.
Mount the antenna externally, but design an enclosure that will blend in with the exterior?
Yes, I realize the example link is for an accent light, not an 802.11 antenna. Use some creativity.
I have seen some wireless antennas that are flat and can be hidden. Armstrong which makes ceiling tiles had a ceiling panel that looked like a suspended ceiling panel but supported a wireless antenna.
All are built from stone or brick and they need to be networked together, somehow. Ideally wireless looks the least disruptive and best option, but it is a Grade 1 listed building and that means no external antennae or high gain aerials are allowed anywhere visible.
First off, why say wireless is the best option and then list the major reason why it is not the best option? Wireless is obviously not the best option.
Do these buildings share plumbing? How do they have phone service? What is wrong with running copper wires?
Done be dissin da brothas. Yo go round moddin me down and Ize bust a cap in yo honky behind.
Dig it?
This is an absurd question. The person asking this question knows the answer and even nearly admits it in the question.
The restriction against high-gain antennae is prohibiting typical aesthetic eyesores from being attached to the building. Wireless networking antennaes are nothing like digital sattelite dishes, or big tv aerials. Wireless networking antennaes are essentially invisible and wouldn't violate the restrictions mentioned. The could even be obscured from sight within faux lamposts, etc.
seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
EDITORS: Can you post a picture of the buildings, diagram? A VRML or other CAD file? Notes and diagrams on existing wiring would be enormously helpful.
Can you run fibre through the plumbing system?
I'm sure we (as a community) can come up with something inexpensive and innovative.
seriously, lasers would prolly work great. here at UMD they've been testing such stuff, and it works pretty well
On the assumption that you can't concentrate a 802.11 signal strong enough to punch through the brick walls...
:) Assuming that the rooves are slanted, it would be no effort to put a high-gain (directed) antennae in the roofs to point to one or two other buildings. It might even be possible to use omni-directional antenna, and cut down on the number of antennae needed.
I seriously doubt the roof is made of brick, too
There are also 802.11 amplifiers available. In the US, you're allowed to pump them up to 1W before the FCC come knocking. That should be plenty, even with an omnidirectional rather than directional amtenna.
Obtain a large quantity of empty coffee cans. Then, obtain a large quantity of string. Lastly, obtain a large quantity of nails.
Using a sharp object, pierce a small hole in the center of the base of the cans. Now tie a nail to the end of a string. Slip the string through one can, then anotehr can in another building. Tie off the other end to a nail and pull the string tight.
You are now networked, old school, as Sir Isaac would've liked it.
What if you have an external antenna, but keep it out of site? Not like the 'pine tree' cell towers, mind you, but you could put a dipole antenna under the eaves or something allong those lines. Possibly you could put it behind bushes, allong the inside of a door frame, all sorts of hidden away, but non-invasive places can be found to put a simple dipole, especially in an old building like that. Windows in rarely-used parts of the house (like an attic) work well, too. Just put the antenna allong the bottom of the panes of the window (windows are usually pretty radio transparent), and nobody will notice.
Narrative
Think of it this way. If these houses share a wall, and one access point can "see" an access point on the other side of the wall, then you could theoretically have two access points talking to each other, and then a third talking to the second, and so on. Within each of the houses, computers could access the network enabled by that point through whatever means (cable or wireless within the house) were deemed appropriate.
Read this writer's own experience with multiple walls over 100 meters for some insight.
You could also try using existing power lines to build a network. I don't know which of these tools are approved for use in the UK, but I imagine there are at least some solutions that can make use of existing cabling.
***Foucault is watching you..***
and they need to be networked together, somehow.
Why on earth would these buildings need networking? I assume they are tourist attractions, what could be needed that can't be done stand alone? I assume they don't even have phones ATM (or you could use those lines).
Measure the distance between the buildings. Let's just work with two buildings here in this example.
You have house A and house B. They are 100 feet apart from each other. Now we know that the average width of a midget is about 2 feet give or take. I don't know about UK labor laws but in the US 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week is your typical.
Soooo... we're gonna need 50 midgets to go between the buildings providing they stand shoulder to shoulder. If you want to cut down on costs have them extend their arms and hire the ones with the widest armspan. But we'll stick with 50 midgets for one shift.
Well we need them there 24 hours a day so we'll need three shifts so 150 midgets. Then you have weekends and vacation, sick time, and other stuff so maybe hire two more shifts worth. Then you can just run straight cable through the sleeves of their shirts.
If class A buildings aren't allowed to have midgets you can dress them up as lawn gnomes and get them taxidermied. It's cheaper that way too. You only need one shift and maybe need to replace them once a year or so.
The best part is, people will come to see Newtons house and to see the midgets too!
Go get the local high school drama club to make up some mock bricks out of styrofoam that carrier waves can easily pass through. All they really require is a weekly paint job to keep them looking authentic since they would need to stand up to the elements...
...ok, ok I give up! stop hitting me!...
Digging is not allowed.
Wireless cost benefit analysis done by a university.
if they're using computers there.
I think there was something posted a while back about
networking over power lines.
If that fails, fabricate an antenna that looks like one of those weather chickens that have the points of the compass on them. The chicken can be the vertical, and the compass points can be the ground planes.
I have a USB based LinkSys 802.11b network adapter. The antenna is attached using a MCX (?) connector and can therefor easily be extended to move the antenna atleast a few inches closer to the outside. Also, the antenna is quite small. If you painted it and blended it in with the stonework I doubt you would actually see it from 10ft away. It can easily transmit a couple hundred yards in the open. (I think it is rated for 250Meters, but there newer stuff is about 400 meters).
You could put it in the window as is and test 2 of them quite easily.
morons.. friggen bust a brick out, open a window, put it on the ground whatever.. antanee don't need to be on the freeking top of the building....
also try cat5. its cheep and plentifull.. why is everyone so bonerfied over 802.11b? lazy peeple who don't wanna run cable or krimp rj-45 ends...thats who likes the wirelesss
.cig
Can't a Pringle's can be made to look like a drainpipe?
MjM
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
A few pictures of Woolsthorpe Manor are here. I would propose putting the arials inside, against the windows in the attic (no tour groups go through there I would venture to guess). The 2.4Ghz signals could pass through the glass unimpeded and would not blemish the exteriors of the structures.
-- Greg
Slashdot, would a spell-checker for posting be too much to ask? It's not rocket science!
how about sticking that large antennea.....up your ass?
dick lickers, you all are.
It's a nice little technology called HomePlug and it might just be what you're looking for. In a nutshell, it's several tens of megabits over electrical copper and works on one side of the transformer. If the buildings are anything like a modern set of tract homes, they probably share a transformer. Simply use these babies and you get a nice little network via the already installed electrical lines.
Good luck!
There's so little difference between politics and jihad lately...
I live in a old (pre-Victorian) house with very thick walls. Unfortunately I have no idea how thick the walls are that we (or you) have but I haven't found walls to be a great problem with our wireless setup. The biggest problem I've found is our large metal radiators, TVs/microwaves and trying to keep access points discrete.
Although it limits the range, in general there should be a sufficient signal strength (even a full 11MBps) to transmit directly through a wall, with a receiver/transmitter on either side (or thereabouts).
I suggest you try borrow a Wireless PCMCIA card (and laptop, if need be) and a Wireless access point from someone, and try them on either side of a wall. If the buildings are all within line of sighs, repeaters on each building's roof should enable decent signal strength between buildings (once again a quick test with a wireless card a a base station should prove sufficient).
It obviously depends on the size of the building, the distance from the nearest point on the building to adjacent buildings and the position of where you need the PCs to have access, as well as the distances between buildings but you might be fine with simply a repeater on each building (a ring network of sorts, positionally anyway), and access points inside. If they're strong enough through the walls, and have line of sight to each other on adjacent buildings, I don't see that you'd have any problems.
Well, as long as nobody nearby has chalk, anyway...
Jon/Manta
The phone lines probably go through some conduits in the ground, so why not route the Ethernet cable through the same conduit?
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Pardon my ignorance, but what reason do these historic buildings need to be networked together for? Are they historic office buildings?
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
--derek
gambitwireless.com
I'm not sure if it'll manage 100m, and you may have to play about with the wiring at both ends so there's as little as possible in the way, but it might do the trick. Besides, it's pretty inexpensive to try out. I've played about with PNA on relatively complex networks and the obstacle is usually the number of splitters/connections and not the distance travelled. I've never tried it as far as 100m, though :)
It sounds odd to me that you can't just pull some CAT5 through where the existing phone lines are. Or, replace a phone line with a CAT5 and use an unused pair for the phone line it replaced. I think 100m is around the maximum that ethernet will go down CAT5.
If cost is no object, you could peg up a GPRS link using a mobile phone :)
Me, I'd try PNA, seeing as that needs no extra messing about with cables. If that fails you seriously need to think about dragging CAT5 through where you've already got your phone lines installed. You might even be able to get ethernet down the phone cabling - I believe (UK) phone cable is still twisted pair, just not screened (or is it the other way around?). But I don't know enough about the issues there to comment more.
Either 1) make an extern antenna invisible,
as for example by replacing a facade stone with
a simulacrum with an embedded antenna, or
2) put the antenna inside. A pair of matched directional yagis (or pringle's can, for pete's
sake) can treat a glass window as effectively
invisible.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
These buildings are within 100 metres of each other. They're not going anywhere. (Buildings tend to be stationary.)
I see no reason at all to even consider a wireless network here.
...just take one of these and some of these and as long as you are on the same phase, you should be good to go.
Now, answering:
The mention of "high gain aerials" points the way.
Find a point in each building where rf-transparent material (glass would be best, but wood sheltered from rain would do (2.4Ghz and water, don't you know)) faces a spot of similar material on a building you want in the network. Finding a trail of thses, connecting the dots, you can then lace the campus together with 802.11 WAPs, pringle-can antennae, and some N jumper cables, and you're using 802.11 to bridge the buildings, probably for about $200US per building. Note that the antennae don't have to be at the exterior wall. Inside a nice DRY wooden cabinet, able to see the target through a window, will do nicely. Sure, the wall may block signal, but it's signal you don't care about anyway. I don't know of any WAP that can be both a bridge and an access point simultaneously, so you'd need a second wap in the building if you want to use 802.11 to the nodes. Otherwise, you just hang the bridging WAPs on the wired network.
OOH! Do these buildings have cupolae? If so, enough rf should shoot through the slits to propogate even during mild rain (put the WAP inside a tupperware container or something).
How about the plumbing? In the US, most homes come with a 3/4 inch aluminum pipe from the street to feed water. Are they the same where you live? Usually, the location that the pipe enters the house is underground and in a utility room or furnace room. You could use that room to drill another 3/4 inch pipe parallel to the water pipe out to the central sewer / water tunnel.
In the furnace room of each house, install an access point. Generally, 2.4ghz bounces off of concrete (but has a tough time going through it). Once you get the signal inside the house, it shouldn't be hard to get it from the basement to the attic.
It sounds to me that the jump between houses is the hard part. Solve that and you've got your problem licked. Perhaps the sewer system will work...
Do it for da shorties
You have mentioned that this is a Grade 1 listed building and that means no external antennae or high gain aerials are allowed anywhere visible. So could the solution then be to make the high gain aerials invisable? I don't know how different plants affect the aerials (pine trees are horrible at disrupting signals) but it seems that a nice full shrubbery may fit the bill just fine.
": If you do not tell us where we can buy a shrubbery, my friend and I will say... we will say... `Ni!'. "
Just put the antenna on the roof, and put an encasing around it that looks like ... oh say a chimney stack. The encasing of course would have to pass electromagnetic signals rather well though. I will leave that to some emag engineers.
This is an easy problem. 2.4GHz sees through Windows like they're made of glass. Just get a pair of linksys WAP11 WAPs with the stock dual antennas, configure them in bridge mode, and place them in the windows of the various buildings such that they have a clear view of one another. These devices run about $170 in the U.S., and are trivially easy to configure. I've used them for building-building at distances >100m without external antennas and had no issues.
aka Matthew at SlashNOT/!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'm not from GB, what is Grade 1?
Newton discovered gravity through an apple. Now Apple Computer can perhaps discover a solution.
Apple's AirPort base station is unobtrusive, is 802.11b and works with any other PC wireless card. The base station can be hidden under a thin, balsa wood box and painted to look like an artifact. You don't need a Mac to use it--Apple offers a Windows version of the Admin software for the base station.
Likewise, any other base station should be able to take some camouflage. The info didn't say if the computers themselves had to have their lines hidden.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
i presume that this may be read by non-techy people so I repeat what alot of peoplle know that read this page sorry about that but I am trying to convince charitys in the UK to use a cost effective solution and not go wasting their money on PC's and such I would much rather they employ a gardner or handy man to keep propertys in good condition than spend money on upgrading and just use the best solution
yes and you could do it with any modern OS (Microsoft Windows XP, Mac OS X.2 and yes linux )
the cost to a charity would be the decideing factor
I would use Debian debian or Redhat also look for a local Linux User Group (LUG) these people would donate their time and expertise I am sure (-:
find UK LUG's here
useing a linux based solution would mean that you may not have to buy any new machines as you could use any that you already have
in terms of presenting information (I presumne thats why you want them networked )
THE best solution is to make a website that as well as you can publish to the world through a website you can also setup Linux box as a kiosk so that you can view nothing else except what you want (just think of the web broser area in full screen ) have a look around www. I am sure they have a solution I just cant remember the link (anyone help out ?)
also remember that DSL or ISDN is a bill every month so you might want a private link to cut costs
also if you have a grant that you can only spend on network I would recomend getting a IR link between the buildings (I have a backup link for the fiber that is between two Uni buildings and no these are not like your IR link on your PC but about 1-2Mbps which is pretty good) I cant remember the people that make it anyone got any good recomendations for IR links ?
hope this helps please contact people in your LUG and when you have a solution up and running let slashdot know !
regards
John Jones
Turn the phone lines into leased pairs, buy some CSU/DSUs, router/gateways, and go to town. Low speed, but effective and reliable. Do point to multipoint or multiple point to point connections, centralize into the building that needs the highest speeds out. Bring in ISDN,DSL,etc into the one building.
This arrangement allows for 56K between the buildings and then however fast you need out of the group.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
To warchalk the buildings when you're done... Or will that violate the 'no visible technology' rule?
That's the key. Cisco makes some of the best 802.11b access points and pcmcia cards. Some other brands just do not cut it. I've got a Linksys AP and both a Cisco 350 and a Linksys pcmcia card. The Cisco card far, far outperforms the linksys card in terms of range from the base station. In the case of wireless, at least, it seems to be true that you get what you pay for.
That said, the Aironet® 350 Series Wireless Bridge from Cisco is an excellent and tested solution that you could use. Of course they are pricey at around $1500usd. A less expensive solution using other Cisco 350 products and a couple of linux boxes could do the trick, but that wouldn't be a tested (corporate tested, at least) solution.
100 meters/yards is really not far. I'm sure someone already said this but you can easily build this with off the shelf wireless access points. I like the Belkin ones (lifetime warranty). Just put them in infrastructure mode and put them on the window sill inside the window. They should go at least 150 meters. If you need more reach, you can either amplify them using some home-made components or bury one out in the yard in a water-proof housing. Now all you need to worry about is security ;)
Front view
I fail to see why you can't cable it with fibre. For health and safety reasons they'll be bright red fire alarm boxes wired with tasteful orange cable, or covered with plastic trunking, all over the buildings already.
All national trust buildings are required to have modern electric cabling for normal lighting, power sockets (for the cleaners) as well as emergency exit lighting (to light the fire escape routes), which will be encased in trunking skirting the walls. Fibre optic or even Cat5 can be added to that trunking easily, and has been done on other historical sites.
It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity. --Albert Einstein
How about using an external antenna but making it invisible to the naked eye somehow? (e.g. putting it inside a stone-coloured box so that it looks like part of the building, or using an antenna that is very skinny or small)
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Try checking with the ham (amateur) radio community. Some of those guys are _experts_ at "hiding" antennas. One that's commercially available for the 144 MHz ham band attaches to the vent pipes normally on a roof, and even has the markings of a standard vent pipe!
I've had good success putting antennae into false bottoms built into wooden flower boxes.
The best way would be fiber to connect the buildings and wireless in the interior. That way you get a cheap speedy network. Just set up access points inside where needed.
Cisco has very nicelooking thin wallmounted accesspoints that can easily be hidden behind a poster or a painting.
HTTP/1.1 400
Just think of how much it'll cost to hire the multiplex/demultiplexer's. Anyways, wouldn't an optic-al solution be more in the spirit of Sir Isaac Newton?
pi = 3.141592653589793helpimtrappedinauniversefactory7
Homeplug could work if all the buildings are all on the same side of a transformer. Cringley has a timely article on Homeplug this week. Homeplug uses standard electrical lines to transmit up to 14 megabits-per-second. Quoting from his article: Now where the wire goes could surprise you, because HomePlug devices will work as long as they are on the same side of a power company transformer. In the U.S. an average of six houses share each transformer, which means your HomePlug network can extend next door or down the street. If you live in an apartment, your HomePlug network can cover the entire building.
At 300 feet apart you should just be able to set up some WAP's near the walls of the buildings and they should be able to see each other. You might not even need to worry about putting them next to windows. At work I have a WAP in a warehouse full of CNC machines and metal racks with brass parts sitting on them, and I still get a strong signal all the way across the building, even through the walls of the office. Granted, that's about 150 feet away, but remember this is coming though microwaves' worst enemy: metal.
-R
We recently had the same problem at my university. Regulations for either digging or placing antennae were quite rigid so the solution we finally used was to get two HDSL modems (we had plenty of phone copper going out) and asked the phone company to patch the two together. Like they would to their xDSL router. (sorry I am not a Telco expert)
This kind of setup can be arranged here in Switzerland, but I hope you can arrange something similar with your Telco. I think they are now discussing putting a real switch and router in the collocation facility, so we can connect all buildings there on the switch, and directly route from there to the net.
Ok, this is pissing me off. You'd think people would know how to use their own damn language.
LOS is Line of SIGHT (Yes, S I G H T not S I T E))
ANd while we're at it, its a Web SITE (Yes S I T E not S I G H T)
I really think that 802.11b is the answer. Check out antennas at hyper link technologies; you can get simple stick antennae, or even better some flat patch antennae which are less intrusive. Obviously, it's prefferable that you place them on the outside of the buildings, but I think they would still work from inside as long as you use high gain ones and point them towards one another.
Dinomite.net
We currently use this technology to connect two of our buildings together. It's invisible, runs at 100Mbps and is not disrupted by rain, birds, fog, etc (we're in Vancouver after all).
http://www.fsona.com/
Run an internal wireless system use the chimneys, and relay signal up the chimney, across to the other chimneys in other buildings and any others in the said office.
Works great,...unless of course they still in fact use the chimneys... *LOL*
We had a similar problem at a historic landmark that was also a working court-house. Our solution was mounting relays on the ceiling and using IR transmitters.
It was also only a single floor building.
Short-story: It worked and was damn expensive -- but would be considered too slow by todays standards. I wouldn't doubt that stragically placed 802.11 repeaters/bridges and 802.11 nics would work nicely. Might even be about the same cost (once inflation is figured in)
-jhon
An antenna could be set up at a distance run a wire into a central hub in the basement and broadcast up into the building throught the wooden floors.
Obviously this calls for a carrier pigeon network they can sit right on the roof or windowsill. and heck im sure they wouldnt be a visual obstruction to the eye. You know it, they know it, and i know that this is your only solution. :)
Use Wireless.
put yagi in attic, doesnt even have to be a window, wood and stone dont mess with 2.4 gig to badly water and metal (shiny window coverings) do. you might need a small amp but i doubt it. i could give more details if i had a layout of the area.
There doesn't seem to be much information out about how well they work.
An easiest & cheapest solution (although low speed) would be to use panel antennas set inside opposing windows and two WiFi bridging routers.
The antennas are only about an inch thick, cost about $40 to $80 each and they come in a variety of sizes like a 4 inch square (8 db) and 8.5 inches square (14 db). Rectangular ones are also available, if that shape fits your windows better. Any double sided tape could be used to secure them to the inside glass. Check them out at several companies including: http://www.hyperlinktech.com and http://www.fab-corp.com.
The final component is two bridging 802.11b routers (802.11a could be used for faster connections). The cheapest are the Linksys WAP11. They are easily configured for bridging and cost just a little over $120 each. This puts the total project price at about $400. We are also a non-profit and we are deploying this exact configuration for a shot about 600 feet (200 yards) long.
We had a wireless network going across the street from the 9th floor of a building to something like the 7th floor of the one across the street using old lucent antennas sitting inside the buildings. through the glass. it worked just fine.
(these are the old yaggi in a tube ones from like 3 or 4 years ago -- i'm sure there's a more current solution)
... for radio waves in GHz range. Old houses don't have metal reinforcement meshes, so one can treat anything to be "line of sight" as long as it crosses only brick walls, plaster and wood. What they have to look for is the line that is not blocked by trees/plants with leaves that have size comparable with a wavelength (poplar, maple, etc. -- I have no idea what grows in that particular place) -- those contain enough water to work as antennas, so they can block the radio waves easily.
The whole "night not work" thing is silly -- one only needs two laptops, or laptop and AP to check if the link can be established, first with builtin antenna, then with small patch antennas, remaining indoor in those buildings.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
In the UK, you might want to consider buying a permenant, pure copper connection through the exchange for a flat rate, then put your own 2Mb modems on it.
It's a while since I looked at these services, but I think they are the ones listed here.
Andrew
I admit that was offtopic but was it such a low quality post to merit punishment?
Put antennas in suitable rooms that have a line/semi-line of sight. I believe you can get upto 155Mbps out of them, and they can pass through quite a lot. You may want to refer to them as 3^xx wavelength transmitters though. Fuddy duddy grant councils get scared by technology and might think their Grade 1 building will be cooked from the inside.
Warning, IANAMNE (Microwave Networking Expert), but search google.co.uk for microwave antenna indoor, check the uk only box, and you should find someone who is.
How strict is the "No Digging" rule? I could understand not being able to dig an enormous ditch, but could you go in with an edger?
We recently had some wires run throughout our yard. It took a large circular saw (an edger would do the exact same thing), and you couldn't even tell that a hole was dug unless you were right next to it. The stuff done through the grass is barely noticable now (and I'd guess that, given a few more weeks, you'll never be able to tell).
I'd say run some Cat5 (or fiber if the runs are too long) through a hose (I'd be really hesitant to bury plain Cat5, though it might work out just fine.) I can't comment on the legality, though, but I don't see why it'd be prohibited if it's not really "digging" a big hole, but rather making a small incision...
________________________________________________
suwain_2
The solution is to simply run a conduit between the buildings underground. It really is not that expensive (I have consulted on several projects doing just such a thing).
It is the best solution for the astetic views and it also if done properly can allow for future expansion by simply running another line through the conduit.
Or they could just have that email system I saw on TV (I think his name was Ted).
Seems like visible has to be the key word. I am confident that most historic buildings have features that would allow you to hide a wireless antenna. With a little imagination.
And look out for falling apples. They were great for Newton but trouble for Adam and Eve.
Hard line (cabled) ethernet cannot be used as it will be both be too expensive
Huh?
Cat5 isn't expensive...we're talking 500m-1000m of cable, which should run about US$750 ($250 per 1000ft) retail for plenum cable...and they should be able to get it for much cheaper than that.
About US$250 should cover everything else (connectors, plates/biscuits, etc).
Unless its the cost of digging (because its a historical site)...
...Xoff
Phineas J. Whoopie, you're the greatest!
Even a high-gain antenna which would normally be visible can be completely concealed or contained within another object, as long as that object won't absorb or reflect electromagnetic waves in the microwave range. To quote Dragorn during the talk on 802.11b at H2K2, "If you put it in the microwave and it comes out hot, don't use it."
I am !amused.
Something we have all missed. Or at least I have missed. Stone makes a Faraday Cage. Glass must make a faraday cage also. So why doesn't wireless work?
OK. I maybe I did miss something. Doesn't the place of running water and electricity? Run the cable wires along the electric lines, where ever they are.
Diguise the antenna outside. Visible means visible as an antenna from the ground. There should be places on the roofs which are out of sight.
But also remember that if these buildings have telephones [which I'm sure they do, for reasons of security at least] then adding ethernet links between them would cause no more damage than that caused to install the phone lines.
Once you get inside the individual buildings, wireless with just enough power to cover the volume of each building is all you need...
Where is problem??!
Why doncha move to a real country where no building is more than 50 years old?
If you can mount antennas behind the walls, inside the buildings, and pointing to each other, you might be able to try a 24dBi directional antenna with 1 Watt amplifiers. You can find these antennas, cables, and the adaptors to connect to Cisco or Orinoco equipment. I wouldn't use the Apple Airport or Linksys consumer grade wireless equipment... I'd try to stick with the enterprise "survive anything" grade equipment such as Cisco's Aironet 350 bridges or Orinoco's ROR-1000s.
You can see what we're doing at the University of Connecticut where we're using a combination of Cisco Aironet 350 bridges and Hyperlink Antennas and amps to connect a Research Vessel steaming around Long Island Sound. We recently went out with the American School for the Deaf.
If you have some dry pairs (unused pairs of telephone wire going from one building to the next) you could also try PairGain equipment. We use those as well at UConn... they are point to point DSL modems... last I heard, they can push 5Mbs.
If you have any questions about the wireless stuff, you can e-mail me. Good luck!
You wouldn't see them pony up with $$ when I need help, I bet.
Digging is not allowed.
Are there drains or sewers?
Unlike copper cables, fibers can be strung through wet and toxic paths (such as sewers) and work just fine.
Use 'em both to interconnect the buildings and to bring in the phone and data services. (You can get phone and data on a single fiber pair no problem.)
If you have to run 'em through a sewer just clean the ends with dilute bleach after the plumber gets 'em strung and sealed in.
Only downside is you have to be careful if you ever need to snake the drain to unclog it from tree roots - unless you're willing to re-string the fibers afterward. (Use a preventitive biocide instead if there are trees near the drainpipe.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
they need to be networked together, somehow
What's a historical place need a network for? It hasn't had it yet. Therefore, there is nothing there that needs to be networked unless you add something new. Something new would make it less historical.
Or maybe I'm on crack and the ghosts just want to play a huge Quake tournament together.
TodayTM BillyJoelTM GoogleTMd for StitchTMes due to WindowsTM while RollerbladeTMing with an AppleTM and a PopsicleTM
at my university, we have tons and tons of old stone buildings that have recently been made wireless in the past year by simply adding tons of wireless access points to the existing wired infrastructure...perhaps that would be your best option.
People have been hiding antennae for years in situations where they are distracting or otherwise undesirable.
Dominos farms (Ann Arbor, MI) has a tower that looks more like a bent sculpture than a cell phone/radio/microwave tower.
I'm certian you can take a flat 802.11b antenna, put some durable rock looking material over it and place it inconspicuously on the exterier of the building. It need only stick out an inch or two.
I would try, though, first putting a high gain directional antenna inside the buildings pointing to the other buildings. The rock will dampen the signal, but I bet you'll get more than enough to improve vastly on 128k.
Lastly, look at using two DSL modems and the on site phone wiring. You can put most DSL modems into a peer to peer mode, and they simply go over any used or unused (phone levels) unshielded twisted pair wire. Think of it as a higher version of the venerable modem, but broadband since you aren't actually trying to transmit over the phone networks digital switched network. This might actually be better than wireless.
-Adam
Great idea! I recommend these:
i nt/
http://www.nettonettech.com/solutions/point-to-po
I'm curious why they need internet access.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
I'd just add that you can tape^H^H^H^H firmly secure the antenna behind the window frame to make it totally invisible; 802.11b goes through 1.5" of wood with no problems.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
One way would be to create a co-linear antenna and bury it in butyl rubber in a crevive in the stone work (or just heat shrink over it and bury it in mortar (and hide the cost in maintenance to tuck-point the stone-work).
Do they have indoor plumbing? A device called a "Vent-tenna" is made for amatuer radio operators to disguise their external antennas.
Ask any ham in the area that lives with restricted covenants. They'll have lots of ideas.
Any flagpole handy? Replace it with a high-preformance fiberglass radome and put a wireless antenna inside.
You are dealing with 2.4 or 5 GHz so use 1/4 inch hardline (at a minimum) for the long runs to reduce signal loss.
Hire me as a consultant and I'll make sure you have a solution that works well and meets all your technical and apperance requirements.
Does it have an attic? Often above the eave line is timber and you might make due with an antenna in that area. Also check out the offerings by Motorola for a commercial band alternative that is higher legal power. Or, get a waiver from the British equivalent of the FCC to run higher power and use a commercial "export" amplifier (which also has a receiver pre-amp as well). Lots of options. Directional antennas indoors to reduce the attenuation of the wall structure.
Make sure that whatever you do (except maybe building to building optical links) you wet the buildings down when checking signal strengths. BTW Apples airport software as well as Orinco/Wavelan/Lucent/name-of-the-week software have signal strength test modes to check for antenna placement. Take an Airport and a laptop and play a bit to see what the through the wall loss is. If you use multiple base stations watch out for hidden transmitter syndrome. Something hams on packet radio (well the smart ones building networks) have known about for ages and the wireless network folks on the 802.11x, etc. side are just now figuring out.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
If the four buildings just need to be networked together, and you _don't_ need Internet access (a lot of other posts seem to think this is for Internet access, but neatan only mentioned the Internet for use with VPN), then you should be able to simply use the copper wiring to create your own little 4-building "DSL-LAN".
/. a while ago: I, Cringely's Roll Your Own DSL. He gives you some basic direction for grabbing extra copper pairs from the telcos and plunking modems on each end. I'm sure there's more to it than what he describes, but that should give you 2Mbps symmetric bandwidth between your four buildings. The Lariat guys might be able to give you more help.
This was posted on
It won't go through thick brick and stone. It's also adversely affected by the plaster-on-chicken-wire construction popular in the 40s LA.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
If there are existing phone lines, is it not possible to set up some sort of VPN over DSL that does not require the addition of more phone lines?
MWAHAWHWAHWAHWAHWAHWAHWAHWAHWAHWAHWAHWAHWHWWA HWA WHAHWA WAHWHWAH WAHAWHWAHWAHAW HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!
*wipes the tears from his eye*
DSL in Lincolnshire? You MUST be kidding right. Anyone who wants broadband in this farming hellhole has to pay $1500 to get satellite installed, and then a nice $120 per month to BT for 512kbps downstream and 256kbps upstream!
That said, Boston, Louth and Sleaford have DSL in the town centers, but that'd be like only Dallas and Austin having DSL in Texas.
To put it bluntly.. BT are a bunch of cheap, lying, no-good, rotten, four-flushing, low-life,snake-licking, dirt-eating, inbred, overstuffed, ignorant, blood-sucking, dog-kissing, brainless, dickless,hopeless, heartless, fat-ass, bug-eyed, stiff-legged, spotty-lipped, worm-headed sacks of monkey shit who couldn't organize a piss-up in a brewery.
mogorific carpentry experiments
If they have windows and line of sight can't they use infrared? How fast does the network really have to be in a couple of houses that are hundreds of years old? what exactly do they do that they need the network for anyway?
-
Someone taking a huge dump might disrupt the signal, so don't forget the error bits.
Best of luck ;)
I've done this a couple of times in the Netherlands where companies often buy up old mansions which are too expensive to live in due to the hideous property taxes there. What we normally do is design custom antennas which fit with existing building features.
For example, many older buildings have heavily painted metal rain gutters around the roof (I can't remember if Woolsthorpe Manor has this). What we did in one such building was to build two antennas from plastic sheeting made into a tube the same diameter as the gutter and disguised it with the same paint. Properly mounted with the cables running inside the gutters, it was nigh impossible to see that the antennas weren't part of the drainage system.
If the building you're working on doesn't offer this sort of feature, there are plenty of other options. For example, with the sorts of ranges you're talking about, it would actually be quite easy to do things like hide wire antennas in the putty of the windows, or run them across things like curtain rails or under the roof overhang. Over 100m a well positioned wire antenna could quite easily give you at least 2Mbps between these buildings.
You have plenty of options with disguising - it just pays to ignore the off-the-shelf stuff and make your own.
David Shirley
Lift some shingles. Put an antenna there. Place some stuff that looks like the shingles that do not disrupt the signal (assuming that the shingles would).
Welcome to the land of the free...pay toll ahead...no photography...please open your bag...
As far as 2.4ghz is concerned, brick is essentially invisible... on the other hand, wet brick is not...
Just use 3 1 pair phonelines and crimp on an RJ-45 connector. Sure, youre out 3 phone lines, but I would prefer to live without phones rather than my network
why not use pigeons? india does....
Actually there are some interesting things being done with electrical wiring as long as the buildings aren't seperated by transformers.
. html has the scoop.
Bob Cringley's http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20020815
good luck...
Simple, easy, not unsightly method... run fiber cables between buildings, then hook up a closet in each building, set up a router and firewall configuration for a t3 in some closet and you got it made. simple, fast, not unsightly and only requires a little modification (bury the cables)
Do they have windows that face each other?
If so, WaveLAN would work well. I used to use it to bridge a nework across the street from the 9th floor on one building to the 10th on another. We couldn't mount external antennas except on the roof, and the building management companies wanted a fortune for roof access. So we went with these instead. 2 antennas that we stuck in the window, each about the size of a deck of cards, and off we went. The range on the two omni antennas was about 100-150 meters, and if we'd gone for the small directional magnesium antennas that we could also mount inside and point out the window, we would have had a few kilometers of range. Looks like Orinoco bought them out a few years ago. Lucent also sells a lot of the antennas and components, as well.
www.orinoco.com
..and they can hide the transmitters behind the block walls too !
Look, it's simple. All you need to do is take a flat directional patch antenna, like one of these [hyperlinktech.com] and put it somewhere under the eaves. Paint it the color of the house and that should be it. 8dbi is the smallest one, and that should be plenty of gain for this application. They even make 'em up to 14dbi, but they're 8.5" at that point.
If this doesn't solve the issue, I don't know what will.
How about each side wear aluminum foil antenna hats.
Table-ized A.I.
The Airport Base Station made by Apple would be a perfect solution. It has no external antenna, can support wireless to wireless bridging, requires no computer to be continually connected to it, and supports a variety of different wired connections.
I work in a ground-floor data center in an old building. My indoor 802.11b access point is across the hall and must cross through 2 foot-thick cinderblock concrete walls to reach me.
I have good bandwidth, with a generic omnidrectional anttena on the AP. I can also access the network from the street 50+ meters way.
A plain-vanilla 802.11b wireless network with directional antennas will work fine here. 802.11b's wavelenth lends itself to these sort of applications (802.11a, while faster for line-of-site, degrades badly in these types of situations).
This is true even if the antennas are indoors, pointing through brick walls.
Add directional antennas pointing through windows, and the situation will improve dramatically. Add small hidden outdoor antennas, and the picture is even better.
A wireless tech told me that he hooked up a 50-mile 802.11b network in Africa between 2 mountaintops (one with local internet access, with other without). The wireless link was 2 'only' mbits (down from a theoretical 11 mbits), but otherwise worked fine.
This one's easy.
For instance, the existing ISDN line could be changed (note that ISDN and DSL can't share a wire pair) to run "dry pair DSL" to a telephone junction box down the road, with equipment kept in a nearby barn, or even just a splice to connect two SDSL modems in different buildings. Or at least it could, if BT weren't such fine arseholes.
Probably the best idea is to use a mains LAN if there are existing electrical power lines. As long as all the important outlets are on the same side of the final transformer, they should be able to communicate.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
If the buildings are on the same main power transformer (that big cylindrical thingy on the power poles), it should be possible to use powerline networking. http://www.hometoys.com/mentors/caswell/jun00/powe rline.html
If you still want to use 802.11, it should be no trick at all to tuck the antenna behind some curtains by a window that faces the other building. Also, some stones are transparent to RF, so you might be able to send the signal right through the wall.
If all else fails, get on to an amateur radio newsgroup and ask about sneak antennas. Hams have been dealing with restrictive antenna ordinances for many decades.
How about laser transmission between the two buildings? Two years ago when I was busy helping to kill a dot-com, we needed to move about two blocks away in Manhattan, but apparently our T1 would require digging up Broadway as that part of Silicon Alley was having a shortage of buried copper. In any case, I don't remember the company, but our network guys got a laser system installed that worked quite fabulously. Only real hitch was when a construction worker on the roof unplugged our device to plug in some power tools. We ran our network as well as IP phones serving 200+ people over the system and it worked quite well.
Get an industrial RF module that works in the 433 or 868 european unlicensed bands. These lower frequencies penetrate walls much better.
No, they are not as fast as WiFi. Most of them are around 19200 but I've seen some that run at 1 mbps. The lower bandwidth improves sensitivity and increases the range significantly.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
We use two "oldish" laptops with Wireless cards running linux (smoothwall etc) to route traffic between them. .. but a good wireless lan-card (we use Web-Gear) has no problems .. our points are about 250ft apart .. but we "warwalked" the cards out first, they will operate over twice the distance. I suggest doing the same in this situation. Oh one thing to watch out for is "planning permission" but thats a "political" battle not a technical one.
We have thick stone walls (as in 2ft) and iron-glass windows
Good Luck!
take 802.11b, add a nice and hot power amplifier 2Watts atleast, and use a patch antenna, and voila high speed connectivity without the headaches.
/* AMITRA */
duh...
The answer is to start serious lobbying against the present system of Grade 1 listing, to ensure that structural changes to allow modern communications etc. are permitted so long as they are easily reversible.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Do what they do for cell phone towers... try to disguise them as trees.
A have a high gain antennae outside in a fake BOX that looks like a ROCKY WALL.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
http://www.consume.net is a community group playing with wireless networking in the UK where there are different restrictions from other countries on the use of 802.11. Check them out.
I think the keyword here is "visible". So either you install the antennas indoor (behind windows made of plastic, in the roof) or you could use one of these antennas they use for cellphone base-stations. I've seen one that looks like a cross installed on top of a church...
thank you
outside of the building, in LOS of the window, I get about 100 meters. Inside the building, through the other apartments, I get at best about 30 meters.
It might be possible to have the access points near the windows and connect them to a small switch for the internal building network. then have the access points do the routing between buildings.
Just one of many possible solutions I suppose.
*** I had a
It clearly must be possible to wire between buildings, or BT would not have been able to install phone lines. In which case digging to put in fibre would be the best option. If for some bizarre reason BT is allowed to dig and you are not, ask if they can provide EPS-8 or EPS-9 circuits between the building (basically, copper pairs that bypass the exchange). Depending on your distance from the exchange, you might possibly be able to run SDSL. I think a baseband pair is around GBP 1000 to install and GBP 350 per year. SDSL modems around GBP 600 each. But wireless must surely be possible - a stub antenna inside a chimney isn't going to be noticed!! I don't know that any Powerline equipment has a CE certification for use in the UK (please feel free to contradict!)
The equipment is inexpensive, and every outlet becomes a network connection point. See Cringely's 8/15/02 article on the subject.
It's faster than 802.11b, too.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
1) No high areals visable:
This points to a camaflouged areal for wireless. On the other hand, do you really want to open your network to the public? (AKA use a VPN)
2) Telephone wires run to the house.
Does this mean you can run more cables to the house? In the US, in house phone networks are generally cat3 compliant. Also their may be some issues with networking inside the house.
2b) Telephone wires run to the house.
Their were suggestions for using DSL (you will have to provide your own service - Cisco (disclaimer, I own stock) will be glad to help), and using compression on one of the phone lines. In the US a CSU-DSU will get you 24 56+8K channels, I beleive Europe uses ~31+1 64K channels.
3) 4 buildings less than 100M apart.
This implies ~350' building to building. This distance implies 802.11b networking with an external antenna. You just moved from $150 access points to $300 access points with $100 antennas. If you want to get a highly directional antenna you can try 802.11a which should reach up to a mile. However it's going to be a b*tch to set up.
4) more information is needed. For a small fee and travel I would be happy to help;)
5) Oreilly.com has a good book on the subject, with parts online. Read it if you are not going to pay me to do your homework.
6) Running a wireless network costs ~$120/link, It also is unlikely to incorporate a phone network (wireless VoIP is available, but VoIP still has manufacturer interoperability issues that won't be resolved before SIP). Since a phone network may have to be wired, installing a computer network on the same path has a lower cost -> ~$90/link.
7) Did I mention security? At a minimum you should be looking at 802.1x compatable equipment.
good luck,
alex@mcdiarmid.net
With several wireless APs set in repeater mode.
Easy.
Dirk
Does a family of sub-standard operating systems from MSFT have more to do with RF radiation than meets the eye, or should you not have capitalized windows in your comment?
And, for that matter, Linksys is a proper noun.
Why not employ the age old methodology VCPPN? ( virtual carrier pidgeon private network) advantages: No antennaes required... inexpensive to operate ( works for chicken feed) does not require line of sight? and Bird droppings can be used to fertilize the gardens or be donated to the republican national committee
Servants, Guv.
We put wireless on buildings where antennae's can't be visible from street level, so we just move our laser links out of LOS of the street. If this isn't an option, what about HPNA? I'm assuming there is already some sort of phone line backbone in each building..
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
First, since it's a Newton then you'll have to avoid hand writing recognition.
But seriously, you can use bridged wireless and could probably turn windows into antenae/run the antenas in the window sill/frame. So wire up from house to house and get a bunch of cheap US Robotics WAPs and use the Open802 software to turn them into mini-Linux boxes. (http://opensource.instant802.com/) This will allow you to take a $70 WAP and turn it into a bridge. You could also probably reprogram one of the points to run backwards and drive the wired connection to run a hub in a house if you don't want to put wireless cards in all the computers.
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
The magic 8 ball says that the Grade 1 rating is the fly in the ointment. What is it and how can we get around it?
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
While you state that you can't have an external antenna, how closely can you skirt the rules, and place a small, (6-inch by 6-inch), directional antenna in an upper corner of a window, pointing from one building to the next? Then you could simply have a reciprocating pannel to catch the signal in the next building.
3Com's Access Point 8000 would likely do what you want, or they have a point-to-point modual that's made for just this. And frankly, depending on the distance involved, you might be able to push it through the stone wall and catch it on the other side in a similar manner, then your antenna could be mounted in a closet where no one would ever see them, save the janitor and the IT guy.
Awk! Pieces of eight. Pieces of eight. Pieces of seven... ERROR: General Protection Fault. [Paroty Error.]
There is a new kid in town...HomePlug (see I, Cringely). It sounds promising, if it really works - I just hope linux is quick to support it. It is the use of home wiring, something talked about for about 2 years or so but finally, and perhaps, ready for the big time. As long as the houses are on the same transformer from the power company, they should be easily networked via HomePlug.
No changes to wiring, no rewiring, no external changes. Sounds about perfect.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
Also remember that these beams can bounce off metallic surfaces. If these walls don't let radio signals through, they might also be reflective. So a beam through a window might reflect off another building and reach another window at an angle other than line-of-sight. If the street has cobblestones under it, those might also be reflective.
Well, back to the inside of the building...
No cupolae on Woolsthorpe Manor. The Newtonia site is gone except for the Wayback Machine. The picture there and on other sites shows a high pitched roof.
The Newtonia pictures inside the house show a flat ceiling. I don't know if those rooms are on the first or second floor. If they're on the second floor, then there is an attic. But even if the rafters are exposed, perhaps a wooden cabinet in the rafters could be used for wireless equipment.
It looks like a shingled or slate roof. If there is not too much metal in the roof, you could fire a beam through it (I don't know the metallic and moisture content of slate, and there might be a layer of tin). And the building is L-shaped, so all four directions are visible through the faces of the roofs.
Of course, what would be needed are beams (802.11 or infrared lasers) between the buildings, connected by Ethernet cable to wireles access points for use within the buildings.
It isn't as trendy as wireless, but the newer HPNA networks go over existing phone lines, have 10mbps speed, and don't disrupt normal phone use.
For non-public networks, they work fine. You could then setup a masquerade router and share external connectivity.
It does work, but I'm not sure about how activly HPNA is being updated...
Sorry, but what are you guys smoking? Yes, I know it is a historic site, but we are not talking about needing a 300 foot tower with a 80 meter log periodic on top of it.
Stealth antennas are easy to build and are VERY effective. I don't know what the buildings you want to network look like, but I bet there are plenty of antenna hiding places.
I have built antennas for years for ham radio and it is not all that hard to disguise the things so that you would even have a hard time seeing them from a foot away. This 2.4 GHz stuff is even easier to disguise since the antennas are only going to be a few inches long.
By my caluculation, for a 1/4 wave dipole at 2.4 GHz, you are going to need a approximately 3.125 cm of wire. I think that would be next to impossible to NOT hide!
There are the strip antennas that fit on the back of notebooks. They are about the size of a nameplate (and someone can paint the letters so they will look the same except for the wire). This will get the signal over, but I'm not sure if it will do 11kbps (or 54 for 802.11a)
100 Meters isn't that far though. A standard omnidirectional antenna would look like a pipe, so they could use it for a sign or something similar, and could provide over 10db gain - that should bridge things.
Finally, if the buildings are in a square, you could put a repeater AP at the center, so you have 50 meters instead of 100, which might be good for another 6db.
You could use a microwave link between each builing. All you need is a computer each side, each with a microwave card (Samsung makes them) and a small dish (which plugs directly into the card)which can be mounted inside a window. There must of course be line of sight between the dishes. The whole solution should not cost more than a few hundred $ per link.
what is the problem with digging a small trench with pvc used as conduit for cat5? That would be a permanent solution that would be much more reliable. It would also be the least obtrusive.
another example of "seemingly" cool technology being improperly implemented.
Do you think we're stupid? This is NEWTON's house, remember?
Use gravitational waves.
Nice long range, too. And no-one regulates the gravitational spectrum.
(Or do they?)
you desparate bastard you've scammed them all.
Damn ads.
Me thinks that pulling Cat 5 or fiber is just as easy (a little more expensive for materials maybe) as pulling a phone wire.
Despite the signal degradation, you will still get better bandwidth than ISDN... quit crying, get a roll of Cat 5 and get to work. You will get at far better than 128k.
If phone line inside all of the 4 buildings are connected to the same BT's C.O., you could try and order some form of voice leased line (or copper dry pairs, or alarm circuits, or what ever they are called down there in the UK) going from three of the buildigs to the forth.
2 3. html
Than simply buy SDSL modems/bridge/routers capable of operating back to back.
See:
http://www.odessaoffice.com/sdsl.htm
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit200108
seba AT libero DOT it