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A Wireless Network for a 4-Story Apt. Building?
zzzreyes asks: "I live in a 4 storey building, and pretty much everyone in this building is into gaming and computers. I have just received, through the death of a great aunt, about $7,000. I want to know how and what I should buy, to provide wireless access through out the whole building, so we can all share one connection. There are 6 double-room apartments on each side, and we only have four floors. I'll hopefully have access to the elevator shaft, in case I need it. Will $7,000 be enough?" How cheaply could you do something like this, assuming you had access to much of the building? What would be the best way to set up the access points to guarantee the best coverage for the whole building?
Seriously.
if you give me the $7000 I'll get you the equipment you need.
ahem
SURELY NOT!!!!!
if everybody shares the same connection, online gaming will suck, unless you have an OC3
There are 6 double-room apartments on each side, and we only have four floors. I'll hopefully have access to the elevator shaft
Do you, ummmm... or someone in the building, maybe, needs a roomie?
I dont' even need the elevator. I will take the staris. Promise.
Free XBox, PS2
Buy stock in Ask Jeeves, man!
No.. seriously.. put it somewhere and save it. If you want, you could buy a Linksys WAP and a Linksys signal booster and a big antenna and that might work and might run you a couple hundred bucks.
Shouldn't an 802.11g AP do the trick for around $100? I can't imagine spending much more than that for the sake of my neighbors... Maybe a repeater on every other floor would be the worst case scenario...
With so few and so fixed appartments I recommend you set up ethernet connections to a common box. Less than 1K total cost. Then set that box to whatever external connectio you like (if you like to).
--
FreeNET user? Comfortable with the adverse selection?
Maybe that's not enough. Wireless access point X 2, antenna X 2...
yeah, i do think it'll be enough. but do like the 1st popst says, lol. if you dont wanna pay off the house or anything thn i do think 7000 will be enough. i think you need wireless nic cards for each pc, a wireless router, and some repeaters. someone correct me if im wrong ;)
...maybe you'll win a beauty pageant tomorrow and you can wire your neighbors! Stay outta jail!
Capable of 5 modes of operation, work with external attenns. I would probably think 4 or 8 would cover most of the area.
use the interest/dividends to buy the stuff you need.
You will need access hardware from/for your ISP (e.g. cable modem, DSL modem, etc. Usually Most likely you will need at least one wireless AP for each floor. Depending on the thickness of walls and size of the building, multiple APs might be necessary. Budget around $100 (rough number) per AP for consumer grade equipment, which is all you probably need. Don't forget to put each AP on a different wireless channel - and stagger the channels to minimize frequency overlap (e.g. Floor 1: Channel 1, Floor 2: Channel 9, Floor 3: Channel 4, Floor 4: Channel 11).
You probably need a NAT since you will have many people needing IP addresses, unless you want to get a subnet prefix from your ISP (at $7k that isn't likely). So at least one NAT box is needed.
If you are comfortable with Linux networking, take a look at a Linksys WR54G as described here - one of these on each floor would allow you to have a cheap AP + detailed control of banwidth (i.e. make sure that no one guy hogs all your Internet connection).
At the access point you will need to put that NAT mentioned above, plus a switch for between floors. The Linksys could act as both and is a cheap solution. If Linux isn't your bag, then a decent low end (SOHO router) such as a D-Link DFL-300 would be a good thing (with built-in firewall to boot, which would help).
In terms of wiring, get at least CAT 5 cable run ("CAT 6" is even better) to every floor. A separate wire to every floor, all culminating in the basement (or wherever your Internet access is) gives a measure of reliability in case of a wire fault or router fault on one floor. A patch panel at the termination point of all the wires is a good idea.
Expect to spend a large amount of the money on the labor for getting the wiring done. Professional cable pullers can charge high 2 digits to 3 digits/hour. If you hire a professional company to do the whole thing including picking equipment, setting it up, etc., then $7k isn't near enough.
I applaud your noble effort. However, I must warn you. Once you take responsibility for setting up this network, everytime something goes wrong, you will be the first person the tenants come to for help. Even though it sounds like your neighbours are computer oriented, I guarantee you will be swamped with more problems than you bargained for.
Good luck.
Simple suggestions..
1 - take a laptop around and see how signal strength is..
2 - block all outside access via mac address restrictions and encryption.
3 - expect some boob to start dling kiddy porn and get you in trouble with your isp and have your connection cut off... ( remember most AUP's prohibit this with out a business account )
4 - good luck not getting sued.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I just checked out the product for a magazine review I'm writing (checked out means I talked to the marketing reps). They have a cool distributed solution where you deploy $300 thin access points that do 802.11b/g all over the place (like one in every apartment, and run normal Cat5 wire back to a central switch that automatically configures the APs for best channel coverage/etc. Single point of configuration, saturation coverage, and they said a small installation could be done for $5,000. You can even put in the building plans into their software and it tells you where to put the APs.
With WDS you could implement a wireless "backbone" with 4+ access points, one (or more) per floor. Then one access point would connect to a router box which would in turn be connected to your broadband link.
You're gonna blow your $7K will on a network for your building? Invest it, man, then from your profits implement such a network. A big waste, IMHO.
A blog like any other.
Why be such an asshole?
Just there was a story on increasing options to the Linksys WRT54G wireless routers. Maybe you can try 4 of those (1 per floor) and settings (encryption is a must so people not allowed to, steal your bw) to help against abusers.
He's right, you know.
If you really can get to all the apartments, why not put an ethernet drop into each one? Let people install their own wifi points if they want them.
yo.
heh. more like $200 or so. two linksys wap points could saturate over 10 miles with proper antennas easy, let alone a 4 storey bldg.
700 wil git you enough and them some. The elevator shaft might want to be avoided because of all the metal. perhaps 1 access point on each floor with a couple of higher gain omni directional anteannas will do it. although i hope you have a good 10mbit line or a T1 as this is gonna eat bandwidth. O and make sure you go 802.11g
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
posted why/how? How does this qualify as news/interesting story/informitive?
Are you "special"? Is this one of "those" types of buildings?
Why are you subsidising the whole cost of the installation?
If all the people in your building want to get wireless, they should chip in, shouldn't they?
On the techical part, I don't know, but I think $7000 should be MORE than enough to get the whole thing running in all the building.
Again, it's none of my business, but it is my personal suggestion not to be so eager in spending so much money like that. Unless you REALLy want to play with those guys. Who's going to pay for the fixed internet connection fees later?
Give me $5000 and i'll set up your network, you take the $2000 and go get an edumacation on computer networking.
...Ossifer Consulting will do it for you!
"I live in a 4 storey building, and pretty much everyone in this building is into gaming and computers.
Is there a vacancy? I want to live there!
I'll do it for $3500.
Unless you own the apartment, put your money elsewhere!! Put together some specs if you like and then let the people involved pay for thier part of the infrastructure! Seriously man, that's good start on a downpayment for a condo or house. IMHO..
Yeah, we're on the same page, I was including the cost of a handful of access cards for the PCs being used in the price.
oh yeah sure, mod up a flaming geek who thinks he's the all knowing geek god.. oh yeah buddy, for your info.. you're a flaming little cunt
you fucking mods are all fucking pieces of shits... why don't you stop being fake and actually not buy into the censorship propaganda that slashdot tries to impose on to you
I'd run the cable to a central switch and have an access point on each floor. This setup will work well for lan games, but if you're all trying to do online gaming, you better have a decent connection.
I know this part doesn't answer your question, but I'd agree with others. Invest the money, buy a house, pay off debt or do something you wouldn't otherwise get a chance to do.
I have no
Now, in each room you could have the person buy a high gain antenna, or have them build their own cantenna and just shoot towards the AP along the ceiling to avoid pissing people off with radiation going through their minds.
In a small building like this...that situation should work very well.
Speaking at Defcon 12 - Credit Card Networks Revisted: Pen
Don't waste this gift on crap. Your great aunt left it to you, not your apartment building. Buy a car, pay off some debt, invest it in a managed fund - do something useful with it rather than waste it on people who won't even say thank you.
I'm sure many companies would wire the whole building for less than $7,000. Are you sure you want to get yourself involved with such a risky venture?
The elevator shaft will be useful as those wireless packets will need some way to get from one floor to another and packets are far too small to negotiate the 4" riser on a common apartment stair. They can easily shimmy up and down those cables, though.
grammar-lesson free since 1999. (rescinded - 2005)
It shouldn't cost anyplace nearly that much money. For that much, you could probably get the whole place wired. Gaming isn't going to be a good thing for wireless, anyhow. But if you insist on doing something wireless, what I'd suggest would be to look for some powerful 802.11g gear (Just top-of-the-line consumer stuff, nothing pro level) and just put one unit on each floor in as central a location as you can manage. It'll be hard to work out the specifics, but I can't imagine it taking more than one unit per floor unless the rooms with computers are long distances from eachother.
Now what I'd really suggest would be to have it wired. This may be something to discuss with the landlord and it wouldn't even be that tough to do, in some cases. You could possibly even run wired connections through the same lines the cable goes.
But if wireless is truly the only option you want, and you can get access to the elevator shaft my suggestion would be to run a 100Mbit line into the shaft to a switch, then drop a potent WAP at each floor level on seperate channels and names, that way you're not sharing all the bandwidth for all the floors. Linksys WAP11's would be good for this as you can hack them to get a little more power.
My own pointless vanity vintage computing page
get 2 Catalyst 2900 off ebay as you backbone (about 250$USD each)
then a WAP per 3 appartement (being generous here 2 per floor could be well enough depending on the materials used to make the walls) that can do repeating
so 16 D-Link waps at about 50$ each that's 800$USD
then get 3 box of 1000' cat5e cable , say 70$ each = 210$
then maybe 1 or 2 computers to provide some services like firewall/nat dhcp , maybe a mail and web server , and a squid transparent proxy (350$ each for something descent)
if you don't count your time that's just 2200$
and you've got way more than you'll really need
since it sounds like you all want to share one connection, im guessing you are gonna want a pretty damn fast connection, a la T1 or partial T3. check out this site for quotes, i found it to be a good resource: Bandwidth.com
The "Insert Quote Here" line is almost as predictable as inserting an actual quote.
Just buy about 4 wireless routers. The linksys linux-based ones mentioned early today on slashdot are great. Whatever you do, DONOT GET BELKIN! They are based on a misconfigured Nucleus Plus kernel. They frequently crash, and have to be power cycled. In addition, many of them have a bug making them ONLY work with IE/windows. They fail with mozilla, konqueror, IE/mac, and safari because they append a character 0 (aka 0x00) at the end of a javascript file. I reported it to them and they shipped me another older version of the router, which works with mozilla but the wireless signal cuts out every 10 minutes. /rant
Anyway, just hook them up at places throughout the building... in different people's rooms. These will form the main network that people will connect to. Their wireless card will automaticallly pick the closest one... just make sure they have the same SSID. Then, either connect the routers wirelessly or with wires. If you want to do them wirelessly, you'll need either a seperate wireless gateway or an additional router for each main router. These gateways will connect to your internet router.
for 7 grand, i would look at just cabling it instead, personally. 1000' spool of cat5e should run you no more than 40 bucks, ends are usually about 30-40 bucks for a bag of 100. as far as the internet goes, unless you get something that has good upstream in addition to great downstream, the internet is going to seem like a dog. also if you have ppl who hog it with things like kazaa, then its going to feel slower than dialup for everyone else. you are definately going to want to look at some kind of traffic shaping/firewall/nat box.
Why is this flamebait? He's standing up for the little guy. As for the parent, fuck you asshole.
Ok, you say apartment so I'm assuming rental to begin with, don't bother! Take your $7,000 and use it for a downpayment for a house of your own, interest rates are low right now and you are much better off paying a mortgage of your own rather than someone elses for them.
Now, if it's a condo, check the D-Link DWL-900AP+ access points out, they will run in repeater mode so you could share probably get away with doing it with 2-4 units spread around the top floors.
The big question will be your gateway, with a dozen apartments you could all share a T1 line easy enough but there are monthly costs and likely be the same or more than cable/dsl alternatives and really that's only if all apartments sign up and keep paying.
If you are renting, let the landlord build this type of "service" rather than wasting your own money, put it to better use, just buy 1 AP and whomever can see it can link up.
or you can stop trying to be buy your friends and pocket the money or spend it on something worthwhile.........
Use this as your AP: http://www.buffalo-technology.com/www/products/wir eless/wla-g54.htm
w ir eless/wla-g54c.htm
beyond that setup repeater/bridges as signal is needed - maybe one per floor (depends on the builing's layout).
http://www.buffalo-technology.com/www/products/
Straight off the Buffalo site:
The AirStation 54Mbps Wireless Compact Repeater Bridge-g is an affordable, simple repeater bridge access point that is added to your existing LAN to create a wireless network. Support for Wi-Fi Protected Access(TM) with AES and 802.1x as well as WEP for added security. The 54Mbps Compact Repeater Bridge supports the Wireless Distribution System (WDS) or Bridge/Repeater Mode for point-to-point or point-to-multi-point communication and to cover dead spots in Wireless LANs. The easy-to-use 54Mbps Compact Repeater Bridge is the affordable wireless solution to create and add a secure wireless network to your existing LAN.
This soulution should cost you $500-$1000 for infrastucture and then you just need client cards. I'd leave that up to the tennants.
"I live in a 4 storey building, and pretty much everyone in this building is into gaming and computers."
... college.
Ah yes,
I used to work as a property manager for a number of different properties spread out through the city, with a number of different owners.
From that point of view, DON'T DO IT!
Consider:
1) You have to get permission to do any wiring and you'll be running wires of some type (power or CAT5) through the building, which will require the owner's permission.
2) You can spend all that and have a great time, but the landlord can decide to sell the building at any time, and you may suddenly find out you have to leave either at the end of your lease term or with as little as 30 or 60 days notice.
3) How do you know, after doing all that work, that you'll get to take the equipment with you when you leave?
4) Why are you investing in a building you are only renting? (You have no way of knowing that, right or wrong, you'll be able to take the equipment with you when you leave!)
Basically, you don't know how much longer you'll be living there and a number of things could result in an early termination of the lease, or other problem. While the equipment is yours, there are a number of ways the owner can keep you from taking it. Hell, the owner could even sue you for putting it in.
As a property manager, my job was 1) Protect the property owner from any harm or damage (not just physical) (that includes the property itself), and AFTER THAT, 2) Protect the tenant from harm (also not only physical), but this comes under #1 because anything that hurts the tenant could result in a suit or other harm to the owner, including inappropriate or illegal actions of the owner that hurt the tenant.
In such a role, I can tell you that I, and almost every property owner I have either known through networking, or worked with, would not want a tenant, no matter what they know about computers, crawling through a building and installing equipment the OWNER doesn't fully understand. And if an owner allowed it, you have no way to be sure they'll let you keep it later, or even allow it to continue to operate.
The owner also has to consider what could happen if a building inspector came through and you had violated a law you weren't aware of.
Maybe your landlord allows this. That doesn't mean you'll stay there long enough to make it worth while, or that you can keep the equipment later. It's like digging for gold in someone else's mine when, at any minute, they can walk in and say, "I've changed my mind. You can't keep the gold. It's all mine." Would you do that? Most likely not. Doing this is the same thing.
Be wise. Invest in something you'll have for a long time or that is yours, like a car, or a house downpayment, or even a cruise to an exotic location.
Oh, and I live in the US, so I don't know laws in other countries, but you've still got to face the fact that what you do may benefit you for only a short term and could benefit the owner for years.
(Oh, your lease is solid, you say? Check. I saw buildings bought and sold all the time -- sometimes tenants had till the end of the lease to move out, sometimes only 60 days. There are too many variables to be sure you will stay for years in an apartment.)
no, you're mistaking him for your father
Look. I'm sure this seems like a chance for you to be all munificent and a geek hero to your building-mates, but why spend Your money on this? If these guys are into gaming and computers hit them up for money, you are going to have to manage the project anyways, so collecting money isnt that much more work. Otherwise you're just blowing your cash. Or do you have a share in ownership of this building?
>saturate over 10 miles with proper antennas
:)
this sounds cool, but what are "proper antennas".
no, i dont intend to try, just curious
-Dan
Oh for crying out loud - While you're hearts awfully generous, there are geeky accountants throughout the world shrieking at your decisions.
Analyzing how many apartments: 6 on each side (assume 2 sides?) x 4 floors - thats 48 apartments. 48 computers at least sucking in bandwith.
Hmm.. Now why the hell would you spend your money on providing Internet connection to all those computers? You've got more issues than just cabling/connectivity:
1. Bandwith - Into the building, enough for 48 computers (at least) - can you get that arranged as a central pipe?
2. Who's paying for the Internet bill? Why should 4.01 share the same internet connection with 3.05 - everyone knows 3.05 runs twice as many computers and lags us out.
Really, and this is important - how are you going to divy up the cost of your internet usage? On a user pays? Sure - I only have 1 computer connected to the internet (maybe it's only acting as a firewall/router) - i've just got 3 others connecting to it. If everyone in the building wants it - go through a Strata plan and do a bulk deal for the building - and then monitor d/l's - so only the people who go over d/l limits pay for the extra.
Look - it's a nightmare. Don't do it. Go on holidays instead - buy a nice digital camera and visit some lovely places. I'm sure your great aunt was always telling you to get out and get some air.
To start, I'd buy a single 802.11g WAP and a single wifi card (preferably for a notebook). Plant the WAP somewhere central and walk around with the notebook and see what kind of link quality you get.
/.
You might also want to try connecting a server to the WAP via one of the ethernet ports (assuming the WAP has some) and do some file transmission and pinging as you walk around, to make sure your connection is clean. Or maybe do some test gaming against a machine connected to the WAP.
If you can reach it from everywhere, good!
Otherwise try different locations and try to minimize the number of positions required to cover every location likely to have a PC. Then you just need to get an 802.11g card for every PC.
It must be a slow news day, when something like this gets posted to
And a slower work day when I respond.
Lots of people have given suggestions over the types of hardware to buy or other places to invest your $7000. Why not just reply to one of the many, many friendly people from Nigeria and use your $7000 as a transaction fee for a transfer of funds. You'll receive a good 30% of a $50 million transfer in funds, which is $15 million. It's a no-brainer!
"I live in a 4 storey building, and pretty much everyone in this building is into gaming and computers. I have just received, through the death of a great aunt, about $7,000."
I would suggest putting that $7k towards your retirement. Invest it in a solid fund or IRA. This would be much wiser than blowing it on a technology that will be outdated in a couple of years.
What a crap! This article is better suited for the dorks forum. An the mod that pemited this article is fucking moron.
I hate to be one (of the many) to belittle your dream, but I have a friend who received a similar amount of money and started a savings account for retirement. He's a smart guy, and I hate him for it. :P
Karma: Bad (mostly due to all those "In Soviet Russia" jokes)
Okay, so 12 apartments per floor, 4 floors. 48 apartments, and we'll assume they're using their own routers and cabling within the apartment if they have multiple machines.
First: What is the total number of wireless connections that a channel can handle? I'm going to say 8, just because it sounds like a nice number. Then you have I think 11 channels on 802.11b. That gives you, what, 88 possible addresses? Okay, that seems possible. But holy RF noise!
Next: What's the range on your 802.11b within the apartment? You guys are gamers, so lost packets are going to really mess up the whole point of this network. You'll need to make sure the access points are close enough to the apartments to not drop your packets.
Another point: Are you going entirely wireless? I.e., are you running a cable to the AP at the top of the building, or are you going to have it send all that information wirelessly to your central router?
I've raised more questions than I've answered (I've answered exactly zero), and I know I'm no guru when it comes to wireless. But maybe these are some points to discuss individually to get the ball rolling......
Darned tropical millipede! What's it doing in our apartment?
> What kind of donut should I buy tomorrow?
I'd recommend a cruller.
There are 0x40000000 types of people: those who understand 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point, and those who don't.
You have to get permission to do any wiring and you'll be running wires of some type (power or CAT5)
He said he wanted wireless...aside from the wiring needed for the cable/dsl momdem which is normally already there anyway, he shouldn't have to run any extra cabling anywhere.
slashdot, news for crazed liberal socialist zealots
Agreed. It's also hard to imagine anyone's grandmother wanting to finance her grandson's friends' gaming habits. Although, maybe he wants to do this to learn a little about wireless networking and help his friends out in the process -- either way, I wish I lived in his building :)
meep
wire it. Wireless doesnt handle a pile of users very well, espcially bandwidth suckers like gamers and what not. 100 meg ethernet is cheap, extremely reliable, and has a lot more bandwidth to boot .
Keep in mind that wireless is x mbps SHARED, like the old ethernet hubs were, as compared to standard switched ethernet, which gives each port (and user) dedicated bandwidth.
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
Um, ok, this is peculiar.
1) Why would you spend that much money on setting up wireless in your appartment building for everyone? Unless you've already got a surplus of income, you own the appartment building, or you're into some sort of odd techno-charity urge addiction, I'd suggest you don't waste your money on something so frivilous: buy a house or pay off your debt, FFS! Hell, invest the money, if you don't have debt and don't want to buy a house.
2) If in fact you are crazy or do own the appartment building, by all means, set things up to share internet access - at a (minor) to your tenants (either enough to cover costs, or to make a profit, you decide how nice you want to be). Personally, if it were me, I'd wire the place for ethernet (myself), provided the building wasn't too old (1970's). If the building was old and crappy, I probably wouldn't bother, and try and sell it off - though it would certainly still be feasable.
You can choke wireless networks up pretty quickly, and they introduce needless security issues. For the cost of an 8-port (or 16, or whatever, depending on how many ports per appartment you put in) 100BT (or go GigE, the cost difference is negligible now) and a couple hundred hards of cat5, you can get hundreds the bandwidth/signal quality and many times the security of wifi. The cost would be similar, and could possibly be under $500, provided you didn't splurge and get a nice managed router to bridge stuff to the outside world.
To be honest, though: I don't see why you even bothered asking this question. Are you not a geek? For me, the most fun of any project is the planning and getting things set up. You've got the resources of hundreds of thousands of knowledgeable people, after all: the Internet via search engine (WTF are you doing with an "Ask Slashdot", anyway? DAMN). The payoff of your work (ie, the planning and research) is the implimentation - to see how well you planned your project. What's the payoff if you have someone else do the research/thinking for you?
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
can you buy a house for $7000??????
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
I agree, let everyone pay for it, unless you want to be declared the first geek-saint. I lived in an appartment I I convinced the owner to put UTP in every room. I put a hub in the basement and provided internet access to my 7 neighbours for 5 Euros per month. Since my cable ISP had no download limit, only a 80kb/sec bandwith limitation (I prefer that over a 500kb/sec with 10GB dowload/month), I had no worries. Only a few people overloaded the network but I wrote a script called ditchthebitch.sh to take care of that.
Anyway, UTP is preferred over WiFi because of security reasons (tapping ito a cable is quite harder). Also, I have wireless and watching a movie over an NFS mount is impossible, with UTP at 10mbps it is no problem. So I guess for gaming wireless would be too laggy, too.
The only problem I had was nobody wanted to play against me. I played Quake against my neighbour once and I won with 30/-1. So I advice you to let the others win the first time..
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
Use one access point, located across the street with a directional antenna and a good view of all your windows.
May or may not work - do you know anyone you could borrow equipment from (you don't need an actual internet connection to test it)
be sure you understand your liability.
Like if a neighbor downloads too much,
or uploads to Kazaa, or hosts a game server,
does your service provider cut you off?
Good luck... sounds like a useful project!
Cheers, Joel
Speakeasy.net
They let you share bandwidth. You sign yourself as accountable so you might want to create a legal entity to hide behind (corporation or nonprofit).
They'll even take care of the "billing" for you. You could charge everyone actual-cost, with a higher bill for the guy who consistently "forgets" to turn off P2P filesharing to/from the outside..
What you need to do is choose between 802.11B and 802.11G (I'd probably go B for what you have in mind). Purchase the following:
an access point (not a router, an access point)
a pcmcia or usb 802.11b adapter
an omni-directional, high gain antenna for the AP (7-9dbi, slotted waveguide, vertical colinear array, etc)
Install the USB/PCMCIA adapter in a notebook, and start experimenting with access point/antenna locations on each floor. The Access point does not need to be connected to an ethernet drop to test signal strength. Remember that the omni antenna have a horizontal donut shaped radiation pattern, so you need to mount it pretty close to vertical for your tests.
I suspect that you will need 2 AP's per floor, so your cost should look like this (assuming you do all the work):
Internet Connection: ??
8xAccess Points - Dlink DWL-900+: $512 (newegg)
2000' cat 5 pvc cable: $70 (computergate)
16 port switch - DLink DSS16+: $75 (newegg)
Surface mount cat 5 boxes, 3x4 port boxes at switch end, 20 patch cables: $200 (computergate)
Total should be less than $900
The biggest problem you are likely to face is getting power to the Access Points. Power Over Ethernet can be a little bit of a pain to set up if you are now electronically inclined, and building code can be your enemy in terms of running extension cords or additional outlet boxes.
Also remember that there are special code requirements for running any type of cables through a vertical shaft like the elevator shaft. If there is an existing conduit running vertically for phone cabling, that is your best bet.
Also/FYI: my experience is that cheap patch panel antennas are useless. The two I have purchased do not outperform a standard dipole.
Dean
Speakeasy.net has a service http://www.speakeasy.net/netshare/learnmore/ go there...thats a good place to start.
Check out www.locustworld.com
Nice Accesspoints, or roll your own with their software. Cool Features:
Wireless BackHaul on a different network
Automatic Routing
Easy Setup
Access Control if you like through a captive proxy.
All you really need are some junky laptops.. one 802.11b (for the users to access) and one 802.11g for the high speed backhaul. Each node automatically integrates into the mesh.. very cool... can be done VERY cheap.
Faz.
-=-Ze End-=-
Don't be so sure everyone is gonna want wireless. The weaker signals and compatibility issues with people's wireless cards on their computer could cause headaches
I think it could be end up being cheaper and more practical to get the building professionally wired with Cat5 cable. Let the individual tenants setup wireless in their units if they so please.
Also, I know there are issues with wireless networks and 2.4 ghz cordless phones that you might run into also.
Goodluck.
Everybody here who's recommending wireless access points are recommending one per floor. Why? Wireless access is measured by distance from the AP in three dimensions. I use my own AP on multiple floors where I live. Somebody directly below it could be closer than somebody on the same floor but in the corner.
All in all, I think it's a waste of money and this guy's feelings are going to get hurt later on. Unless they're family or very close life long friends, why go to this expense and effort for them?
You should buy $7000 worth of a stock index mutual fund and add $2000 every year. Assuming you are about 20 now, by the time you are 45 you will have over a million dollars.
An index fund invests in all or most of the stocks in the entire stock market, which has averaged a 17% annual gain since 1920.
Instead of playing philanthropist to your gaming buddies, take care of yourself. Most of them are going to forget you exist in a few years. I'm going to turn 50 this summer, and if somebody had given me this advice when I was in college I'd be home in my backyard right now, instead of sitting at this desk looking over my shoulder to be sure my boss doesn't catch me posting on Slashdot.
Fscking a, man. You stole my reply. Home Grown +1 Funny from me.
Often, fixtures become the landlord's property by law and lease once installed, rather than the tenant having the option to remove them.
It's certainly the case in much of Canada, and could well be in most of the states.
Larsal
The backbone of a wireless network is wired. Let's get that point out first in the discussion.
We don't want the wireless access points speaking to each other by wireless... that's simply going to be too much use of the limited RF space, and we have to assume that people are going to want to use 2.4 GHz phones so we won't have all that RF to ourselves...
My best bet would be a wireless access point on each of the four floors as close to the center of the building as you can place it, and then have those four access points have a wire all leading to a central 100mps switch that's placed wherever you can put it.
The access points should be configured to not to speak directly to each other over RF, that's what the wires are for. Therefore, all the RF bandwidth is reserved for users, and hopefully they'll be running on the lowest power settings possible to speak to the AP on their floor and therefore with the lowest RF noise...
A new wireless company has guaranteed (or your money back) reception if you use their wireless card and access point. One AP should cover the whole building if you put it in the middle somehwhere. Total cost is about $90/user plus $200 for the AP. http://www.direct2data.com/
perhaps chocolate glazed...
Keep in mind that if you set up this network, everyone and I mean everyone is going to be calling you whenever the internet connection is down or the network isnt working. Get ready for tech support apartment building.
->Insert mod down here-
I can't believe this guy. A family member dies and leaves him some cash and the best he can do with it is waste it on wireless networking equipment for a closed community of gamegeeks?
If you aren't going to be smart and invest the money, at least blow it on something worthwhile to honor the memory of your aunt.... a charitable donation of some sort or a scholarship.
Let the rest of the people in your apartment building pay for their own networking equipment.
7 $1,000 hooker-bots, or 7,000 $1 hooker-bots...Decisions, Decisions
Ohhhh pulease. The choice is an traditional glazed cake donut. All the way.
Geez, I just hope we're not too late -- questions like this tend to get answered by shysters with "well, that's cutting it close, but I'll see what we can do."
I have an 802.11g (Apple Airport Extreme if anyone cares) access point in my basement, in an electrical closet. I'm up on the second floor, on the other side of the house, and get excellent signal strength.
Now, that's only three floors, and my house isn't huge. If your four-story building is large, you should still be fine dropping a single access point in the middle of the second or third floor, assuming you have a cable drop at that location.
Worst case, you need two access points, and with the Airport, they can daisy chain one to the other -- one access point can use another access point for...access. I don't know about other brands.
Use that $7k towards a HOUSE down payment, and get the hell out of your apartment. The satisfaction and quality of investment you get from owning a house will be a lot better than the grief you get from trying to be a nice guy.
Lots of people have trouble with the signal between a linksys wifi nic and a linksys AP going through more than just a couple walls. Depending on the design and materials used in the building, you could end up needing as many as two APs per floor.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I think you should setup a big wireless network around the building. Encrypt it with modest protection (in case any of those tenants are 1337 h4x0rz) and charge for access.
Get a powerful Ethernet-based router that can filter traffic by MAC address. Register each tenant's card for billing purposes.
This way you can monitor traffic by MAC address, to see who is using the most bandwidth. Again, be prepared to spend a couple hundred dollars on a routerthat can handle this amount of traffic. Get a fat connection. I'd recommend (3 x T-1). If the bandwidth gets out of hand, get a packet shaper, or filter directly on the router.
Use the 802.11g, it is almost as fast as 100Mbps Ethernet and should be good for many years to come. Ethernet lasted 30 years and it's still a very viable solution for networking. 95% of the public won't need anything faster than 100mbps for a long long time. Many could still do just fine with 10Mbps.
FAIRLY stupid?
If he wants seven grand to buy him affection, he should spend it on hookers!
Keep the money. Put it in long-term bonds.
Forget about it.
Some day you will be glad you had it.
Ok ok, so its been a long day.. everyone knows i meant most AUP's prohibit the wholesale sharing of bandwidth among other users... ( not all, but most )
Time for bed i think....
---- Booth was a patriot ----
mod 5 browsing all says "don't do it"...for various reasons from getting sued to getting arrested for kiddie porn downloads. I have another don't for you...when you come up with a really cool, altruistic and geeky idea, don't post it to slashdot, it will get slammed.
/.ers were so negative
I had no idea
I didn't really see where the question was about online gaming or sharing internet for everyone. It reads like he is trying to make a private gaming network via WiFi.
Everyone gets a USB bridge, and set some WAPs out, and you have a LAN party 24/7. no internet required with 40 some people living there. Of course each apt. can still have thier OWN internet service at thier own cost.
LOL..
"Ain't I a stinka..." - Bugs
Nobody would blow $7 on wiring the building for his neighbors... My guess is that either he was hired to do it and doesn't know the first thing about it, so he's turning to slashdot, or that he's doing it with the expectation of charging his neighbors for internet access and making money off of them.
This deserves a post on /dot?
Dude it's noble of you to provide bandwidth access for your building but you should put that money in a bank account.
Screw em let them get thier own internet access.
Given that you had to ask the question, I'd guess that you could probably use some help.
If you're not used to running and terminating CAT5 cable, then I suggest that you find someone to work with you who is.. as somebody else pointed out, the expensive part would be paying someone to do that part commercially. It's not really that hard, but having someone who knows what they're doing (and perhaps even has their own tester) would really help.
You should also take a look at what it'll take to secure the wires properly to the shaft wall. If they come loose, the elevator won't even notice as it's shredding your cat[56] to kingdom come.
To find out if you can get away with one AP per one or 2 floors, set up an access point near the elevator, and then beg access to some corner suites on that floor and the floors above and below. Even if you can (theoretically) get away with it, I wouldn't suggest less than 1 AP per 2 floors.... otherwise you'll run into bandwidth saturation problems (presuming you're not trying to service the entire building with a 1 Mbit DSL connection).
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Yep, you heard me, fool
but this is really ridiculous unless you own the building and are planning to lease network access to recover the costs.
Why not put the 7k into a low risk investment and sit on it a while?
--
|-_-| . o O ( bEef!)
a fool and his money are soon parted.
fucking incredible how lucky some assholes get. Set aside, say, $2000 to spend on some nice things for yourself, and SAVE the rest of the money in your bank account. You'll thank me later.
Or you could spend the whole $7000 on a pre-owned souped-up Chevy Tahoe from eBay motors. You probably drive a shitty car now so why not upgrade? The ladies love the SUVs. Whatever you do, don't waste it on your fellow tenants/the landlord.
WiFi is so over-hyped. Yeah, spend alot of money for SHARED bandwidth. Assuming each unit is wired for phone, HPNA will do everything you want for very little cost and labor (since you don't have to run new cable to the units or to the distributed WAPS). If you can get to the phone demark, put in a HPNA switch, your incoming bandwidth router, and you're done. If the apartment dwellers won't cough up the $40-60 for a HPNA adapter or HPNAEthernet adapter then they don't want bandwidth bad enough. Easy to manage via secure web interface. This is the solutions most small hotels/motels are going to. Unless you have a hugh incoming pipe, more then enough bandwidth via HPNA to service 12 units.
Can it be? More than 60 seconds have passed without someone wailing on Cliff for letting "4 Storey" get posted? You live in a "4-story" building, zzzreyes.
Remember.. If you buy a house for $230k and the housing market in your area takes a downturn, you may find yourself OWING the bank money after you sell the house. Just like any investment, you can get hosed on housing.
No serious gamer should even be considering a wireless option for gaming, when you're gaming you want the fastest and most reliable connection possible. Sorry but you do not get this with a wireless LAN, it will always be slower and less reliable than good solid cable/fibre.
I say cable it... drill through walls... floors hang it out windows... whatever.
I haven't read all the responses (looks as if folks have VERY strong opinions about how you should use your money!) but here'ssome experience:
You can do it with one router and lots of cable. Probably $150-$200 plus plenty of time to crawl around ceilings and utility closets.
You probably can't use the elevator shaft (usually illegal due to safety and fire issues) but there are sure to be holes cut between floors for utility services (phone lines, for instance).
I couldn't figure out how many users you might have, but you probably ought to consider a T1 service so you don't max out the bandwidth.
You might factor in the cost of getting an attorney (or local legal services co-op or storefront) to help you make a contract that everyone could sign to share the ongoing costs (T1 or DSL service plus some maintenance). You'll also likely need to be willing to do troubleshooting for the neighbors.
There are contractors and ISPs out there that will do it all for you. While it would cost everyone a few bucks more per month, you would be free ofthe hassle of managing the network, billing folks, chasing down network outages, maintaining the router, etc.
It's nice to hear about someone who likes the sort of community that a project like this could create. In fact, folks could do this without a generous great aunt if they are willing to get to know the neighbors and do a smidgen of community organizing. Good luck!
Contrary to all the "invest in a mortgage" replies, assuming you're quite young, you may be doing the better thing. Get clever enough at setting up this stuff and the difference in your future income can be far better return than the increase in the value of a specific property. Housing in most places is in a bubble right now - not everywhere, but in most US cities it's as bad an investment as dot.com's in '99 (unless you can turn it fast enough at a profit). But the world will be increasingly networked, the networking will be in large part wireless, and the engineering of specific installations will not be outsourced offshore. So go for it.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
I laughed out loud when this guy asked if $7000 was enough to network a three story building. I helped build a wired network in a similar building, and we didn't even spend $200 -- which included an expensive crimping tool that's nice to have anyway. Of course it would have added about $500 to do it wireless (assuming you need three WEPs) and maybe another $1,000 if we'd had to buy wireless NICs for everybody (all of the comptuers in the building, most of which were Macs, already had wired NICs) but that's still a long way from $7000.
But a system, any system, needs to be maintained! I got involved in this project because a non-techie friend asked me to help out. My first advice to him was not to try to sign up everybody in the building right off the bat. Instead, they should start with the two households minimum (my friend didn't live in the same apartment as the DSL connection) and then expand it slowly. In the event, I think he decided that it wasn't worth the hastle to have that many more people involved.
I was recently looking into buying a house, but in this area anyway (Central PA), the market was strongly in favor of sellers. Even at the current interest rates (and fixing them for 15 to 30 years), the prices were so inflated from the market that buying wasn't really as good an option as it first seemed. With the slow appreciation of houses (2-3% tops) in this area, I determined that it may be smarter to play my odds on the market bottoming out and favoring buyers.
While I do agree that with $7k the smart thing to do would be to invest it into something long term, I just thought I'd relate that little tidbit. Buying in this current market - depending on area - could be a bad idea even thought it looks like a good one on the surface. I agree wholeheartedly, however, that s/he should invest in something that will show value down the road. I'm sure you COULD do wireless access for the whole building @ $7k or less, but it's just not a smart thing to do...
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
A word of warning. The default law in the United States and most other common law countries (UK, Canada, Australia, etc.) is that any improvements belong to the landlord. Anything permanently attached to the wall is no longer yours. Technically, if you attach it and then take it down a week later, you're stealing from the landlord. Of course, your jurisdiction may vary.
... there are a lot more suggestions which disuade the poor guy from doing what he wants to do. His question was more on how to do it cheaply and not whether or not to do it. IMHO you can get all this set up for under $1K and if you can scout Ebay then you might come in a few hundred $$s cheaper. My 2c.. which will be moded -1 u'll c...
So you have a wad of cash you don't know what to do with? Want to spend it on something cool but don't have any good ideas? Not a problem. We see this kind of a problem every day, and we have a great solution. If you are looking to install a wireless internet setup, why not invest an additional $2000 and go gigabit wireless? But hey, since you sound like a nice guy, I'll give you a discount, and set it up for only $8000. That's a savings of over 10%! But you have to act quick. I can't offer these kind of rates for ever--we'll go out of business! So here is what you should do now. Put the money in a padded envelope, and mail it to:
Tony's Construction
123 Fake Street.
Spring Field, MA, 18332
And we'll come out and install it for you. Don't forget to tell us where you live!
In Soviet Russia, articles before post read *you*!
The world of wireless is moving away from the unmanagable Fat AP model purveyed by Best Buy networks and even Cisco. The new kids in town are pushing centralized wireless with built in RF Site Survey tools, authentication, firewalls, IDS's and hardware-based encryption. The APs are really just dumb radios that download their configs from the switch when it boots. If you want some big boy toys (that will fit into your budget) take a look at Aruba Networks. We have used them in many apartment buildings and couldn't be any happier.
I answered this in a post above. I think my great aunt would be proud! and if she was around, she would probably come to the ignaguration ceremony!
6 aparments per 2 sides per 4 floors = 48 apartmens. So a minimum of 48 people. You said the were double rooms. Do you 2 bedroom apartments? Oh, so that brings the total people to 96. How are you going to have enough bandwith to the internet to share with everything?? Plus, you said these were gamers!
Yes, but I bought a townhome for $70K and sold it for $120 less than three years later.
I guess you can get hosed if you buy real estate too close to the ocean. My townhouse was in Minnesota.
---
I agree with everyone else here: you're an idiot. Don't blow $7k on a soon to be obsolete technology for the benefit of your neighbors whom you'll soon move away from and never see again, meanwhile subjecting yourself to a whole bunch of work and trouble, and the possible wrath of your landlord.
That being said, here's how I'd do it: Get a laptop with an 802.11 card and an external directional antenna hooked up to it, and get a friend with another laptop with an 802.11 base station hooked up to it via a long ethernet cord. Get on the phone with each other, and walk around various apartments, him moving the base station and telling you where it is, and you walking around with the laptop, pointing the antenna as close as you can to the base station, and checking reception. Do this basic thing in several different apartments, and draw a little "reception map."
Depending on what your floors and walls are made of, you may find you can do this whole thing without too many base stations, so that means not having to run too many wires. Puzzle out the minimum number of base stations required.
Then run cat-5 from wherever your high-speed wire enters the building into a fast ethernet hub, and then to wherever you calculated the base stations should go. Tell all your rich game-playing friends to go buy themselves 802.11 G cards (no "B" cards to slow you all down, as long as you're going to all this trouble) and, as necessary, to buy themselves directional antennas. Then tell them to split the bill on your dedicated T5, or whatever you're getting.
Alternatly, depending on where your apartment is and how you tenants and your landlords feel about it, save yourself a lot of time & money and go the dorm cable route- run cat5 in & out of your windows from apartment to apartment. -Phat Tony
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
Look the guy asked a simple question. He didn't post "hey guys give a philosphical debate over whether I'm wrong for wasting my money when there's starving kids in Africa." He asked "I have 7G's. Can I make a kickass LAN?" He didn't need to mention it was an inheritance, cause you guys would have answered his question. Instead he gives a little TMI and you guys feel the need to grind his morality into the ground. Like he needs that at a time in his life like this. Look I'll try to answer his question for you guys:
I'm not sure. I try to use actual cable for security purposes (still paranoid of the wardrivers) BUT in your case wireless is the perfect way to go. Not like you can go drilling holes and laying cable. From observations I've had, One wireless router (get the switched type so you can WIRE your cables in at the router and put yourself in a different domain to protect your computers), and probably 2 AP's at most. If some need arises, you can put some into different IP blocks and filter only thier content. Setups like that are nearly endless. You're on the right track. Just look up the prices for some common affordable routers like the Linksys models. I've had one of thier non-wireless routers for years and it works great. They now have a 802.11G version of the same router available today. Choose AP's in a similar fashion. If you'd like to test the waters, I'd suggest getting something off ebay at a low cost to get any bugs out and THEN drop the phat cash on some topshelf equipment when you know you won't be dissappointed. Worst thing to do is to drop a load of cash on some equip and then find out it sucks & or doesn't work like you'd planned. Good execution here is key. You wouldn't want to make a memorial that was broken.
Are Communist fucktard morons?
You would only need to spend in a price range of $400 to $2000 dollars fo an entire building with good wifi connectivity.
Firstly, what is this building made of? If it mainly shows signs of wood construction, that's good. Steel and Concrete tend to either soak up or reflect signals and prevent them from covering areas. Also, do you have Drywall or Plaster to cover the walls? Plaster will just like concrete and steel, soak up and reflect signals. (Plaster chips away like rock and you can put dents in drywall like you can in thick cardbord.) Depending on the materials in your building, you may need more or less access points to cover it all. If it looks like your going to need one access point for every one or two rooms, then stick with a copper wire solution as you will get most speed and bang for your $buck$.
Now select between 802.11b, 802.11a, or 802.11g. For gaming I would suggest 802.11g even though it is expensive in comparison to 802.11b. It is able to send data at speeds of up to 54 Mbps (or 108 Mbps if you go into proprietary standards), and is also backward compatible with 802.11b.
Next, come up with a plan on how you intend to distribute data between the access points. This could either be copper cabling that would need to be routed through the building, or you could set some access points as repeaters.
Lastly, realize that you are going wireless, everyone who has a computer is going to need a wireless NIC. (remember, 802.11b is compatible with 802.11g, just slower).
If all else fails, hire a geek!
You are confusing me with someone who cares.
$7k would be plenty for a medium-sized wireless LAN.
But somehow I doubt your Aunt would be pleased if she knew that her "investment" in you was funding your desire to be a l33t g4m3r.
I'm as much an uber-geek as the next slashdotter around here, but do yourself a favor and put the cash into a CD (that's certificate of deposit - not the 12 centimeter shiny disc), or a money market account. Assuming you are young, put it on a house in a few years, or let it grow and pay for your children's college education 25 years from now.
Take this bit of advice from an elder geek who has BTDT.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
i agree with the general tone of don't spend your money on this. if you can talk to everybody and get everybody to chip in equally that would be a much better situation for YOU. on the whole of the matter i would generally advise paying/getting somebody who knows what the hell they are doing, if you try to do it yourself and it fucks up, you're screwed. plus if ideally you are able to split this atleast 6-10 ways the additional cost of hiring somebody is split as well. just the 2 cents of someone who knows little.
You can do it for less than $1,000 if you really want to and if your landlord is cool with it. Honestly though, why bother? Suggest it to your landlord, he can pay for it and it'll be a good selling point for future tenants. Assuming your landlord isn't techno-phobic.
Invest your $7,000 in something else, like real estate.
Get yourself the fastest connection you can afford... (if everyone will be paying 20 or 30 bucks a month that's a decent connection).
Set up an 802.11b router with WDS. Apple's airport base stations have WDS and are super easy to set up.
Set up other routers as WDS repeaters around the building as needed... You probably would only need 3 or 4 depending on the size & construction of the building.
You're done... and you still have most of your cash for better things....like a G5.
$249. Base station w/ external antenna
$099. Antenna
$249. Base station w/ external antenna
$099. Antenna
$249. Base station w/ external antenna
$099. Antenna
$249. Base station w/ external antenna
$099. Antenna
My sister-in-laws mom won a lawsuit and got back $80k after taxes.
After about a year and a half, she still lived in a trailer, the place was still thrashed, she was out of money, and had nothing of value to show for it. Turns out she spent it all at the local Wal-Mart on "cute clothes" and do-dads.
Learn from her mistakes, my boy.
this is a bad idea on so many levels, let me just name a few:
;)
1. 4 stories of people sharing a single net connection doesn't sound like broadband to me, unless it's a fibre line which is probably so expensive that you may as well just get individual cable/dsl services.
2. do you really trust your other users to "be good" ?? what if they're packet kiddies or making unauthorized logins to hosts or running child porn servers -- your isp could cancel service to the whole building just because one guy f*cked up.
3. it's been said before, but $7k is a nice chunk of change, don't waste it on people who wont give you anything in return.
there's more, i know... but come on, i'd rather read some articles about how cool linux is or how much SCO sucks.
Maybe you could, maybe you couldn't. There are a lot of variables you don't go into, mostly topology.
0 03 /
In the last apartment I lived in, if you went into the main hallway of the building, you couldn't pick up any sort of signal from the AP on the other side of the wall. Probably due to the wire mesh in the stucco. In the 2 story building I'm in now, you can clearly pick up a strong signal on either floor, anywhere in the building. Much different construction.
Here's some pictures of my current wireless setup. 802.11b with high gain antennas going from my house to office, 1/2 mile away. Then just a generic AP inside the house servicing computers in virtually every room of the house. My laptop works everywhere in the house, so the cheap NetGear AP handles it.
http://diary.illusions.gen.fl.us/Wireless.Dec-2
You may be able to do it with a basic AP and no special antennas on the floor in the middle of the 3rd floor. Maybe not. You may need one AP per floor with high gain antennas plus copper wiring between them. You may have to put multiple AP's per floor, depending on how much the signal is blocked by walls. If your AP is at one end of the building, and there are 3 2 room apartments in line, you'd have an awful lot of walls between the AP and the last user.
We did copper wiring for a law office once that was a 3 story building. They went nuts with the construction of the building. Floors were 3 feet of cement. Cell phones didn't work anywhere but by the windows in an area with great cell service. It was not a good candidate for wireless service.
Maybe you can find someone locally who's played with this a bit more, so they can look at it, and give you an educated opinion. No one here can give you the right answer, including me.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Fritter. Apple. Top it off with a Timmy's extra-large, black.
yuuuuuummmmmmy.
You mean having to fix the house, and mow the lawn, and live in the boondocks, and all those joys?
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
Yes, perhaps its misleading of me to not emphasize that. Housing can also be "overvalued."
And even though it can appreciate in value and make you money by way of capital gains after a sale, its also the thing you use for shelter. Treat it as such. If it happens to make money, fine.
But it will be cheaper than renting. Also, the money you spend on the interest portion of your mortgage is tax-deductable. Something to consider for those who are highly compensated or just looking for a tax break.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
My suggestion to the poster:
1.)Install mySQL or any database for that matter
2.)Run SELECT * FROM google, user WHERE user.hasClue = 'TRUE' AND google.query = 'wireless network apartment';
3.) ?????
4.) Profit
... nice people like that lived in the house next to mine. (sadly, they dont)
actually, in the area I bought my townhouse in, the prices were stagnant for 9 years. Then they shot up when I bought, and 3 years later, they haven't stopped.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Check your lease and applicable law. If installing wires and equipment is considered a "fixture" in your area, then you lose it the instant you install it. It becomes attached to the building, and therefore the property of the owner. Your lease probably has a clause stipulating to this. It's why you don't put ceiling fan's up in your apartment, because technically it becomes the property of the owner.
Does that really work? I know it would work outside
but in the worst case scenario (concrete bldg with
steel armature and generally lots of metal in the
walls) it probably won't. If your house is built
like a bunker wireless might be tough, even to a
point of needing a wap per room.
So, get a wap, make or buy decent antennas, check
signal strength, figure out how many you'd need,
then you'd know the cost. Also, especially if you
are willing to do work yourself, cabling the house
might be cheapest. Wireless is not a universal
access solution.
... you can convince the landlord to install wired ethernet which would actually make your games worthwhile (i.e. much less latency). Not to mention the per-machine cost is lower. This is actually an attractive idea as a landlord could technically (though not necessarily legally/without pissing off the ISP) provide an internet connection as part of the included utilities, for a small (say $10) bump in the rent. Just a thought. I have, on the other hand, seen wireless networks work great in 2 and 3 unit buildings, as long as the access point is in the middle floor and latency is not a huge concern (i.e. casual, non-gaming users).
I am feeling fat and sassy
Though I must include the disclaimer: I am not an attornoy nor an accountant.
A witty saying proves you are wittier than the next guy.
I would suggest saving the money. Invest it and start saving as much as you can. Then BUY the apartment complex, install wireless internet access (like a T1) and up everyone's rent because they now have free internet.
Then throttle everyone else's bandwidth to 128k or 56k and now you have people paying you for their apartment and paying for your T1.
You know what, when somebody has money, has a project in mind, and wants advice on a project... comments like this are really a pain. Do you really think that most people wouldn't consider alternate uses for the money? Do people always have to have a personal gain in mind raither than a personal "project."
There's nothing wrong with setting up a WAPnet for the neighbours (so long as it doesn't interfere with other people's WAP's etc). There's nothing wrong with doing with one's one money what one sees fit.
You know, if I came across and extra $7000 and wanted to spend it buying a few computers for a school etc, I would much rather have advice on that topic for slashdot than a bunch of "WTF - giving money away - invest it!" BS comments. In this case, the guy is donating to his apartment community instead of a school etc, but it's the same concept.
Oh, and p.s., $7000 is tons for WAP. Why not come down and check out my apartment building when you're done yours </joking>
At the Wireless ISP I work at, we use almost exclusively for client-side links, YDI Etherant IIs. They're great. The radio-card is integrated right into the antenna, which drastically increases Signal to Noise ratio. What most people forget is that the coaxial cable from their radiocard to their (c)antenna is a source of loss and interference. I highly recommend YDI because they take this into account.
What you're looking for would be this it's the same thing, but would provide the access point. One could probably do it, but I'd put my money on two (seeing as how we don't know how thick and large the building is). If you put one at the top of the building in a corner facing diagnonally down, and another facing the opposite way tilted up, this will be MORE than enough coverage. From here, you would just have to plug the CAT-5 coming out the back into DSL routers which would then plug into your DSL/cable connection, and you're good to go.
-GrymSignal Strength Meter
in an apartment...?
dude, use the cash for a downpayment on a house - move out and start building equity... just like many others here are telling you.
then if you are still interested in wireless for aparment buildings, start a business if you are so inclined.
Get a few, and fit them with good antenna. Particularly look at the Hawking Tech 15 dBi corner reflector. Put a few in top-floor and basement locations pointed at diagonal opposites and you can focus power internal to building. Less AP's, less signal tossed away outside the structure.
+4 Informative? That's it? Compared to this Ask Slashdot question, this donut thread is +5 Insightful.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
You guys are not paying attention. He did not ask you how to spend the money. That has already been decided. What he wants is help on how to effectively do the job he wants to do.
I would say that you have not provided enough information. We need square footage of each apartment and the layout of the apartments. What you have to pay attention to is the INDOOR range of your wireless access points. In this situation, I would say you don't need to heavily overlap the access points' signals for redundancy sake since this isn't what I would consider mission-critical. Normal access points can cross over more than one floor. For instance, my roommate has a D-Link cable router on the first floor of our house and we get signal in the basement and on the second floor just fine. So, you could probably put an access point on the second and fourth floors and be good to go. If you find you need two access points per floor to cover the square footage effectively, I would put the second and fourth floor access points on one side of the building and put the other two access points on the other side of the building on the first and third floors.
You will need two to four access points (maybe more depending on square footage) and you will need to measure the footage of ethernet cable you will need. I would buy a 1000ft spool of cat5e. You can usually get that for around $40 or so. Of course, you will have to buy RJ45 ends. Make sure they're rated for cat5e. They should only run you about $0.40 - 0.60 each and you'll probably have to buy them in a small bulk amount like 25 or 50, maybe 100. You will probably need some sort of fastener that that will hold the cable in place once it is run. I can't remember what they're called but you can get little plastic u shaped clips that nail into the wall. That will work for you. You will want to check with your state laws. Some states or counties or cities may have regulations about running all cables through conduit. Make sure you look into that.
You will also need some sort of NAT machine. Wether this is a linux PC or a little black box cable router is up to you. In the end, I don't think you'll spend more than a few hundred dollars. Of course, this is assuming that you have permission to do this. It may be possible to make wireless access points talk to each other via a wireless connection, but I haven't tried that. If you can make it work, it will help you avoid the hassle of wiring. It wont be high performance, but it will be more than enough for gaming.
Good luck!
Okay, I will assume you truely want a wireless network despite the good advice voiced by others.
Since you failed to include any information like apartment building footage, a map/blueprint with your location marked, etc., this will be a general approach that assumes you don't want to leave anything behind when you move out eventually.
1) Buy a WiFi card and an access point (AP) from your favorite company, but make sure it is at least 802.11g (D-Link comes to mind, since they claim near "wirespeed" encryption.
2) Setup your AP (with WEP, largest key available!) in your room (which hopefully is near the middle of the building), and then walk around and see what your signal looks like. Make a rough map of signal strength and note any shadows. While you are at it, you might see if anyone else has their own WiFi already. (You might be able to enlist them in your endeavor!)
3) Decide if you think you need to upgrade the AP's antenna to a larger "omnidirectional" antenna (6db or so. Anything larger than about 8db probably is a directional antenna) so you can reach the furthest recesses of the building.
4) Build a Linix box that firewalls your ISP line, any wire-based Lan you might have, and the wireless AP! You need to protect yourself, or one of you new "friends" will hack you.
4b) (optional) Setup an open source RADIUS server on the box and point the AP to it for authentication that is harder to break than MAC filtering + WEP.
5) Decide which services you will let go through the wireless. Traffic shape (QOS) anything that might get abused but you still want to let through anyway. Make sure to include any game ports you plan to use.
6) Decide how much of your ISP bandwith you want to let the wireless people have, and traffic-shape the interface card.
7) invite a select few of your neighbors to try out the system (give them the shared WEP key or a Radius login)
8) After you get their feedback and see how your network handles the load, decide if you still want to go through with telling everybody.
Costs:
~$300 AP + couple of nicks from D-Link
~$100 New antenna for AP to boost range
~$400 linux box + 3 NICs
$??? Your labor cost to set this all up
If you find that the above single AP setup is not sufficient, I respectfully suggest you give up as a more complex setup is beyond a simple slashdot post. Hire a professional.
- D
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=95563&threshol d=0&commentsort=0&tid=137&tid=193&mode=thread&pid= 8185466#8185743
For those of you that are still asking why!
I have always read really smart replies on most of the interesting stuff; I guess today I am stuck with a bunch of monkeys and a few great people. Anyhow, 7G maximum budget, I know I can do it for like 500, but that is not the point, if I said I have 7G I was thinking someone here would say, you should get this:
Cn300r colubris access point
or
Enterasys RoamAbout AP3000 which supports multiple radio cards.
I was trying to get some high end solutions, of course anyone can go to their local electronic shop and get over the counter crap!
I have looked at potentially getting something like this to test around:
H300-2000 Hawking Technology - WU250 - 11Mbps 802.11b USB Adapter
T156-1072 TRENDnet - 11/22Mbps Wireless Broadband Router
T156-1018 TRENDnet 6 DBI Wireless Directional Indoor Antenna
Also, I am thinking of supplying everyone with cards! Yes, for free, but they remain in the building. Legalities, I have thought of it, my brother who is a lawyer has drafted an agreement between me and the user. Might save me, might not.
It is odd, how a nice gesture now days can get flame beyond recognition just because everyone is so used to being selfish!
I have recieved some nice posts, thanks. greatly appreciated.
By the way... I am not broke, so really, 7G is not a whole lot of money. The people in the building also are prety well off, we are like a community, I guess... The landlord is a really hot chick too, maybe I can get her to help me install my access points!
Check out the building's construction before you spend money on wireless. If it uses metal studs it could be that each appartment is a Faraday cage. If you need a cabled backbone and lots of repeaters to get around that, it's going to push the cost way up.
Also borrow some equipment and test for dead zones and interference problems before you get too involved. A careful survey beforehand can avoid getting into a moneypit situation.
If you buy used or refurbished equipment, chances are that you'll be able to resell it with very little loss when that time comes around.
This is an easy setup that will break NONE of your lease articles and to point out he said WIRELESS. Buy a wireless router (linksys or such) a couple wireless switches, a wireless NIC card for every tennant (or have them buy a wireless switch for themselves if they need multiple RJ45's) and follow this plan: Since you're supplying the whole building net service then there stands a good chance you know at least ONE person in each area that requires an AP. Tell them "hey Bob, to get your wireless to work I need you to plug this box (the AP) into your wall and never touch it unless all the lights go out." This can be prone to idiot mistakes and net downtime BUT you have 1)no wires, 2)no "fixtures" than can be claimed by the landlord, and 3)you haven't broken any fire codes, etc. The worst thing you might be breaking is the EULA for your ISP. Just make sure to not be making a profit (selling services). Call it a donation. I have a wired network and I've had 5 computers hooked to it all maxing out the bandwidth the best they could and have had no problems. As business account would be the way around this and would(should) be legal. A meritous virtue to have in a memorial.
In that vein...."Hey Mr. Donut man, who's tryin' to kill you?" "I don't know...better not." "Reap reap reap!"
Hold on there cowboys. Lots of people are saying "use your $7000 as a down payment on a house!" Like they are some sort of financial expert that knows that a home purchase is better investment than a rental for you!
Before you commit $50000 to $500000 for a small house (depending on where you live!), you should figure out if home ownership is financially sound for you.
Of course, every real estate guy will show you in black and white that home ownership is always smarter than rental. After all, you're investing in something, not pissing it away every month, right?
Well, no, that is not always true! It depends on the housing market, interest rates, tax rates, maintenence costs, rental rates, and a bunch of other variables.
I for one rent. I rent because it is cheaper for me, it works with my lifestyle, and the fact that I can invest my money in other places that give me a much greater return (with only a little more risk). Do NOT jump to a conclusion just because everyone and your father says it's better. My father said that 93 octane gasoline is "better", but I know that's bullshit too.
Back on topic: Do the wireless thing. Do it for $500, and do as little wiring as possible. It'll be fun. In the worst case, if it doesn't work out, scrap the project and sell the left over equipment on eBay.
No no no my friend. She already has the access points.
Playing with a wireless network could be fun. If you get practice working with this, you could work for a company seting up and surveying professional installs in airports and hotels.
Use Ad-hoc wireless Backbone between Regions of the building. Choose a "secure" protocol for the Backbone. (Backbone could be an AP on each floor in close porximity)
Then for each region (or floor) have a second ad-hoc network with one AP plugged into the Backbone by cable.
Space AP's of secondary adhoc networks within strong signal range of each other to reliably cover region (or floor).
You mention that post-war walls are constructed of plasterboard or Sheetrock but failed to mention how pre-war walls were constructed.
Before World War II walls were generally plastered. The plaster was placed on top of wood lath. Lath is thin wood slats that are nailed horizontally across the studs that made up the walls. These slats are placed with less than a 1/4 inch of space between them.
A thick layer of plaster is applied to the lath. The plaster usually has some sort of binder mixed with it such as horse hair or asbestos. The application of plaster was generally thicker than today's Sheetrock. I've torn out old walls where the plaster is an inch thick. It's even thicker in areas where the plaster presses through the lath and hardens.
With a thick ayer of horse hair plaster and sound absorbing wood lath you had a pretty nice sound barrier. It also does a nice job of degrading radio signals.
In older construction you also get a lot of stone and brick walls. Not to mention the solid wood floors an ceilings.
Remember... ZG9uJ3QgZm9yZ2V0IHRvIGRyaW5rIHlvdXIgb3ZhbHRpbmU=
When 802.16 (WiMax) takes off, every computer with a WiMax card will talk directly with the tower. No LAN is necessary.
Pay off student loans? A car? Put it in an IRA? Just because it is easy come, doesn't mean it should be easy go.
DEAR SIR/MADAM,
I AM MR. LEON BANNAU, THE ACCOUNTANT GENERAL OF NED BANK OF SOUTH AFRICA. I REQUEST YOUR CO-OPERATION IN THE TRANSFER OF MONEY AMOUNTING TO U.S.D. 7000.
ON SEPTEMBER 1999, AN AMERICAN PILOT, MR. ROY KENOB, AN AMERICAN NATIONAL MADE A FIXED DEPOSIT OF U.S D 7000 IN NED BANK OF SOUTH AFRICA. ON MATURITY I SENT A ROUTINE NOTIFICATION TO HIS FORWARDING ADDRESS BUT GOT NO REPLY. AFTER A MONTH, I SENT A REMINDER AND FINALLY HIS EMPLOYERS WROTE TO INFORM US THAT MR.KENOB DIED IN A PLANE CRASH, THAT HE DIED WITHOUT MAKING A WILL WHILE OUR ATTEMPT TO TRACE HIS NEXT OF KIN THROUGH AMERICAN EMBASSY PROVED FRUITLESS.
WHEN HE WAS MAKING DEPOSITION IN MY BANK, HE DID NOT DECLARE HIS NEXT OF KIN IN HIS DEPOSIT APPLICATION FORM, WHEN I REMINDED HIM HE SAID HE WISHED IT SO, IN THE CONSERVATIVE MANNER OF OUR BANK, I DID NOT TURN DOWN HIS REQUEST RATHER HONOR IT CONSIDERING HIS HIGH NET WORTH. THE POINT IS THAT HIS EMPLOYER ARE NOT AWARE OF HIS DEPOSIT WITH US, THEREFORE I AM THE ONLY PERSON WHO KNOW ABOUT MR.ROY'S DEPOSIT OF U.S.D 7000 WHICH IS NOW LYING IN DORMANT ACCOUNT PORTFOLIO, THE WHOLE ACCOUNT RELATING TO MR.KENOB'S DEPOSIT IS ALSO WITH ME.
I AM LOOKING FORWARD FOR A FOREIGNER WHO WILL STAND IN AS THE NEXT OF KIN TO MR. ROY. I HAVE WORKED OUT MODALITIES OF ACHIEVING MY AIM BY APPOINTING YOU AS THE NEXT OF KIN TO MR.ROY AS WELL AS TRANSFER THE U.S.D 7000 ABROAD FOR US TO SHARE A WIRELESS INTERNET CONNECTION IN A FOUR STORY APARTMENT BUILDING. I WILL USE AN ATTORNEY WHO WILL REPRESENT YOU AS THE BENEFICIARY TO EXECUTE SERIES A WRITTEN WILL AND ATTESTAMENT OF LATE MR. ROY KENOB, IN SUPPORT OF YOUR CLAIM INCLUDING CERTIFICATE OF ORIGIN OF THE MONEY, LETTER OF PROBATE WHICH EMPOWERS YOU AS THE SOLE TRUSTEE/EXECUTOR TO THE ESTATE OF MR. ROY KENOB. PLEASE NOTE THAT YOU WILL NOT BE REQUIRED TO SIGN ANY TRANSFER DOCUMENT, AS THE APPOINTED ATTORNEY WILL DO ALL THAT.
IF YOU AGREE TO ACT AS THE NEXT OF KIN/BENEFICIARY TO ENABLE ME TRANSFER/CONVERT THE MONEY TO OUR OWN BENEFIT/USE. I WILL GIVE YOU 30% OF USD 7000, 60% WILL BE FOR ME WHILE 10% WILL BE TO TAKE CARE OF ALL UNFORESEEN EXPENSES AS WE MAY INCURE IN THE COURSE OF CONCLUDING THIS TRANSACTION. I AM URGENTLY WAITING FOR YOUR POSITIVE REPLY.
REGARDS,
MR. LEON BANNAU
This IS a serious post.
You just got $7000, and you want to spend it on networking shite? My advice is DON'T BOTHER!!!!!!!
Consider that $7000 spent now is $700 worth of junk next year. You could buy a nice new computer, maybe some other toys, and give $5000 to the bums in the street; and in a year, you'd be no further ahead or behind than if you spent it all.
If you don't want to toss it into the gutter, you could buy yourself some mutual funds for retirement planning, put it towards a down-payment on a house, buy some power tools, or....christ--ANYTHING except flushing it down the technology drain.
Step awawy from the computer. Go outside. Breathe.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
comes in and sues him for downloading songs off of whatever P2P network is there, the FBI knocks on his door about certain threats that originated at his IP, Comcast cancells him for selling internet 'service' without a buisness contract, and finally the IRS audits his complete accounts for 'income recieved' without the appropriate W2's.
Now, yes, WAP for 7K is easy. Buy a bunch of US Robotics, 1 for every 2 floors, and a bunch of wireless cards. Run Cat5 up and down the inside of the fireescape (drill) and stuff the holes with firebreak.
It's not terribly difficult, but you MUST CHECK OUT CODES before doing any sort of permanent installation- why waste bandwidth by using wireless to move 'up' the building.
he asked your advice on how best to implement this. who fucking cares about how he got the money or why hes doing. either, help out or quit being dicks.
You may want to seed the first couple of month's worth of usage just to get your neighbours 'hooked' on the idea, but sooner or later you'll need to have them pitching in on the ongoing charges.
For anybody doing any amount of gaming, $10/month to get a 10meg line into the building, with all of the capital costs covered would be one hot steal. If you're really lucky one of them may even offer to hand engrave a plaque thanking your aunt for her bequest.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
With a little time and effort almost any American can get an amateur radio technician class license from the FCC. It does not allow you to transmit 1500 watts at 2.4Ghz! The 2.4Ghz band is unlicensed and the max transmittion power is 100 milliwatts. The closest microwave frequencies are 902-928 MHz and 1.24-1.3Ghz. You should note that there is only 26 kHz and 60 MHz of bandwidth available respectively. Thus the 23cm (1.24-1.3Ghz) band is the only choice for applications similiar to WiFi. 802.11b eats up 22 MHz of bandwidth.
Digital Spread Spectrum is still in its infancies in the amateur radio community. However, progress is being made.
With what little knowledge that I have concerning radio theory, it should be possible to modify an access point or WiFi card and get it on the 23cm band. It might even be easier considering that 1.24 Ghz is almost a harmonic (half) of 2.4Ghz.
If you do manage to do such a thing, there would be a few requirements concerning identification. The access point would need to broadcast your callsign; this might be fullfilled with your callsign as the SID. The data traffic could not be encrypted, the data could not be offensive, and you must have control over the equipment.
I had that exact same task when I lived in a brownstone in Brooklyn. I put a Dlink wireless hub on the roof and it served the top two floors and I could get the signal weakly even on the bottom floor. Another wireless hub on that floor provided coverage all the way to the basement right through old masonry walls. Total cost (including wire): $300. Throw a celebratory dance party with the remaining $6700 and you can probably provide ecstasy for free!
The flag just makes more sense than the constitution. - Judas Gutenberg
I made a mistake in units. The 33cm (902-928Mhz) band has 26 MHz and not 26 kHz of bandwidth. It would be capable of supporting a WiFi like digital spread spectrum channel needing 22 MHz of bandwidth. Sorry for any confusion.
Is your building mostly drywall? or concrete? Wireless does NOT like to penetrate concrete. 2 walls tops. A good 6DBI+ antenna will go through about 5-6 drywall for about 200 feet with a signal strength you can call "OK". If you mostly have open spaces, with insulated walls, one big antenna can reach about 400+feet with good WiFi cards.
A site survey needs to take place in your building. Otherwise you will probably purchase an antenna that you will not use. There are many flavors of antennas. 2.4Ghz - 5Ghz Wall mount, Ceiling mount. Directional & omnidirectional with different strengths. Most places will choose a directional 6-12DBI antenna on the far wall/corner to cover a floor. Depending on distance you may need a repeater or two.
I would recomend the Cisco Aironet AP with an antenna that would best fit your need. 4 Floors = 4 AP's w/Antennas which would probably be about $4,000. That does not count good client WNIC's for about $100-140/piece.
If you want security you are going to need to setup a server, and maintain it. Then if you want to use Cisco LEAP, you will have to setup a RADIUS server that supports LEAP. I recomend FreeRadius. Downside is that all client NICS must be Cisco for this to work. If this is not what you had in mind, and want cross-vendor support without PKI infrastucture which is a pain in the ass to maintain without smartcards, then install an EAP-TTLS server for PEAP authentication. All of this will require somebody with training to setup, as you will run into a lot of snags.
In any event, you have to support user / password requests from your tenants and any potential problems.
I notice everyone else can only tell you what else to do - so as a REAL geek, here's some answers:
a freenet.org/content/hillshub.htmlx .net/~mike/projects/waveguide/
:-)
1. Do it all with wireless - if the only wires involved are the plug pack to the nearest power point, it is no different to the clock-radio or television when it comes to taking it with you when you leave.
2. Use access points that take PCMCIA cards to do the actual wireless stuff. You can then take out the card that comes with it and install a long range card, like one of the 200mw Senao cards. Apart from the higher output, they are also more sensitive on the receive side.
3. If you are the handyman type, you can build an antenna from scratch (the slotted waveguide I am thinking of can also be bought pre-built). In western Australia we have a wireless group that has gotten 30km (about 19miles) line-of-sight between two of these - and they are NOT directional. You may be able to use just one access point with this and the standard antennas on the clients.
4. Prefer client cards that take an external whip, rather than relying on the internal antennas that are built into most pcmcia cards. This may not be necessary in all cases, but use them where it is convenient.
Some places to start looking:
http://www.wafreenet.org/
http://www.w
http://www.nar
The slotted waveguide in the second link is a 180 degree version - but you can get (or make) a 360 degree version.
Retail on these is about $600 australian.
If you are lucky, one of these on the edge of the 2nd or 3rd floor might cover the building - but probably better to have one at each side of the building, or maybe a 360degree installed in the middle - you'll have to experiment. (you might need one for each floor, or one in each corridor or something). The right gear WILL punch through walls, but not that well (I have a high powered card with small home made whip antenna reaching through two layers of thick earth wall and a brick wall to a normal 30mw access point with its standard 6" whip. the signal is poor, but it's there. My brother-in-law's 30mw card can get through one brick and one earth wall to the access point)
Also make sure your access points can operate as a wireless backbone (if you need more than one). If you can avoid cables through the building you don't need permission, and they can't stop you taking the gear when you leave.
Once you have it up and running, odds are you will be able to re-coup some of the expense from the users if you want (I know how hard it is to get people to invest in something that might work, as opposed to something that is working). That would mean you'll have to leave it there when you leave, but you will also have most of your money back, and can go spend it on networking your next residence
As for all the people that blasted him for wasting money on a rented property - did anyone stop to think he might be a student, or not want to be stuck with a fixed asset for some other reason? Perhaps he is employed in that city for a couple of years, and it's pointless buying a house when he knows he will have to sell it before the value goes up enough to cover the associated fees.
I burst out laughing as I read your post. Very well said and thanks for the laugh.
(Posting anonymously to save karma)
Taken from Apple's Airport Extreme info page:
I vaguely remember that the Airport Base stations are 802.11b/g and that when you use the wireless bridging, it uses the 802.11g "line" for bridging leaving you with 802.11b for your AP to PC/Mac connection. The AirPort Extreme Base Stations run about $200 each and they also have a RJ-45 to connect a "wired" computer in addition to the WAN port for your boradband. I'm sure that using this you could spend $800 and put one on each floor or $1200 and put one in each apartment and each person could connect their PC as well and you wouldn't have to buy an internal/external wireless card for the PCs since most have a built-in Ethernet port.
For the sake of argument, lets assume that this guy wants to become a mini ISP for his building in order to generate some extra income. He wants to offer both wired broadband internet via eathernet, and building wide WIFI to his offering. Lets assume (again for the sake of argument) that he will get a buisness grade internet connection for this project.
He has 48 apartments (6 apartments on each side, 2 sides, and four floors). He has $7k to spend.
What does he need to do in order to make this work?
Assuming he gets 24 people to sign up, what do you see as the ongoing costs?
Ethernet over power bridges from Netgear are something like $90/ea - that is $2,400 to do the whole thing and no exposure from wireless snoopers.
The model I have is XE102 and they seem to work just fine
I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo
thats story not storey right?
I wonder how well it scales. The big problem is that if you have all of the transmitters on the same channel then you run into serious contention problems, and ad-hoc routing is actually quite difficult to do for wireless networks.
There are 10 kinds of people: ones who understand ternary, ones who don't, and ones who think this joke is about binary
Wouldn't a 1500W microwave at 2.4GHz start to cook you? I mean, what is the resonant frequency of water? I thought it was about 2.4GHz.
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
Wouldn't this be a great application of Mesh networking? I see a lot of posts about grounding issues, and other complexities of wiring a 4 story building. I thought the whole point of mesh is to get around this, and is a great way to provide internet access in hard to reach areas or areas that are impracticle to wire. In fact the Linksys WRT54g with the Sveasoft firmware can connect to up to 3 other routers. With the right equipment, you can throw a half dozen or so routers around the complex and you're all set. You only need ethernet going into one router from the ISP, everything else is wireless. (Security/encryption though might be a headache.)
(For those of you you have no clue what mesh networking is (like me) it basically allows you to broadcast internet access over a wide area with 802.11 via several wireless routers that kind of act as repeaters and share internet access among each other)
Don't Put $7000 into your landlords pocket, unless you can get $14000 of rent for $7000 up front or something like that. If your landlord then decides or will agree to placing a networking in the building (which should raise its value)with the $7000, then good for him.
Even if you buy a house for $XK and resell it for $XK (*just* making your money back), you've still lived rent free for those years. Compare even a significant loss against the cost of rent and you're better off buying.
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
Why don't you use the money to self-publish a book about your great-aunt's life, w/ geneology, interviews with other relatives about her etc., and give copies to your family members? Something thoughtful that will actually last.
(Instead of performing the online equivelant of gleefully pumping your fist in the air and yelling "Ch-ching! Ch-ching! Ch-ching!")
A follow-up by zzzreyes here. He doesn't need the investment advice and it's beside the point. I guess mentioning the source of the money was a small mistake on his part, but that's no excuse for the endless off-topic posts.
It lost a point for the cruller suggestion. The correct answer was Krispy Kreme raspberry jelly-filled.
Today is not a good day.. I accidently hit enter on the last comment. :(
Generally the higher the frequencies the more dangerous RF exposure is to human flesh. Microwave frequencies are a lot more dangerous than HF (link helpful in finding more information reguarding this issue.
They'll enjoy it, but won't appreciate it. Keep most of the winfall - make the others pitch in.
Running cabling not directly associated with the operations of the elevator is not only dangerous, but is also against national electric code hence illegal in the united states. That said, you might want to try one access point and several repeaters.
The real problem is that sending watts doesn't do you any good unless the other guy can send watts back or you've got a gigantic antenna.
With great power comes great fan noise.
If you come into money, only buy something that makes money. Don't BLOW your money!
...and you don't want to spend it on yourself, why not pick a local charity, such as The Salvation Army or a community center, and offer to wire together a low buck computer lab for them, so that disadvantaged people can learn a new skill (anything from language to bookkeeping)? It would be technology related, which seems to be your desire, and the charity probably has most of the computers lying around (maybe old pentiums, but they're good enough for training). You can spend most of the 7K for a server(?) connected to a projection system.
Anyway, it's just a thought...
"comments like this are really a pain."
That's the twelve-year-old boy in you talking.
The adult in you (if he exists) is thinking "Yeah, its stupid to spend that money for internet access. And its painful, but good advice"
Listen to the adult in you, not the 12-year-old boy.
>>The 2.4Ghz band is unlicensed and the max transmittion power is 100 milliwatts.
WRONG!!! 2390 - 2450 MHz is in licensed spectrum, and I do not see any power restrictions other than 1500W (which is dangerous when used inappropriately).
Unfortunately, ham radio is inappropriate (in this case) since:
1. Only other ham radio operators could use the WAP.
2. You would be restricted on the type of content allowed to transmit over the air.
But using highpower 802.11b is getting popular with hams. Here is a link:
http://www.arrl.org/hsmm/
I agree with paying off dept. If you have any, get rid of it as best you can. Then don't take on any more.
However buying a house may or may not be a good idea. Studies have shown that you end off about the same if you buy a house, or invest your money. Sure rent always goes up, but you have home repairs otherwise. In fact, I can't rent an apartment as big as my tiny house, and one that I could rent for the same money would be just a 1 bedroom. However dont' forget to account for the other bills. I currently have to pay to pump my septic tank. I have to pay the plumber when a pipe bursts. If the furnance breaks I have to pay someone to fix it. Now some of those tasks I can do myself, but I still have to buy parts, plus account for my time in labor.
Its been said that you need to live in a house for 7 years to make it worth it. If you don't plan on living in one area for that long, renting is best.
There are plenty of other good investments. Talk to a good stock broker for instance (beware, there are many bad ones out there), and you can get on some good ideas. A house may go up in value, but you can sell stock pretty much any day, and any quantity. There is no way to sell a tenth of your house if you want that much money for something. Even if you decide to sell your house it often takes 3 months to sell and a couple more months to close. I know of some houses that took over a year to sell. Wtih stock you can get your money now, and you don't have to sell the whole thing.
Stocks are not the only investment. Bonds have a bad name currently, but they are not nessicarly bad if you understand them.
This wireless plan may or may not be a good idea. If you are planning on starting a buisness (ie there is no DSL/cable, so you will buy a T1 and split the cost plus some profit) this might be a good seed money to get started. Run the numbers though and make sure you are charging enough to pay for the line plus equipment that might break, plus support for the other users. Basicly do a full buisness plan and get someone who knows them to review it. If your bank wouldn't give you a loan to start this buisness why would you spend your own money to start it?
Not rent-free, unless you managed to either a) buy the house 100% cash, or b) get a 0% mortgage.
How will he handle the 12 midnight call about "I connected to your network and you wiped out my hard drive".
Or the late afternoon call you'll have to make reminding the tenant in 8B that he/she hasn't paid their bandwidth bill in 4 months and that "I'm going to have to cut you off any day now..."
Or the knock on the door from the cops at 4:30 because they have a warrant to execute a search based on an RIAA lawsuit.
Or the weekend where you have to replace the wire that the pigeons shit in and ruined the connection up to the 4th floor.
Or the old lady in 3G who calls every fucking hour because "My newphew was just here and now I can't get my email any more, I think its your problem"
You'd better be making stupid money to put up with crap like that.
So you piss away your legacy from your aunt, and for your trouble, you'll piss off your neighbors, and you'll lose money to boot.
Thanks, I'd rather take a ball-peen hammer and hit myself in the head. That would be simpler and more satisfying, not to mention less painful.
A few people have replied saying invest your money, which is a much wiser investment (rather than buying a wireless network).
Invest in a Roth IRA. Investing $7,000 for 45 years at 10% interest (the average return rate, it takes ~7.2 for your money to double). Investing so, and not adding a single penny more, will accumulate to $510,233, a pretty hefty sum.
Don't believe me? Go to this Roth IRA calculator, enter in 7,000 for the current IRA balance, 10% for the interest rate, and years until retirement as 45 years. Don't worry about the tax bracket as that doesn't involve Roth IRA's.
Let your money work for you, not the other way around.
-Vic
Here's how you do it cheap. First, buy a ticket to Cancun Mexico. I can pick you up at the airport, and we'll mosey on down to Playa del Carmen. We'll get you a house near mine and you can set up a wireless router with your 2MB/512KB DSL account and I'll be happy to share your bandwidth. $7000 should be plenty.
Like I said, I am no expert but I would think two access points (at the 1/4 & 3/4 mark) on each floor using 802.11G WAPs (that will do 802.11b as well) wired into a decent router would give pretty decent and even coverage across the building.
I think you could do it for a lot less than 7G too!
Just send the check to me, and I will take care of getting that wireless thing up and working:
Shane Lenagh
9835 Evans St.
Omaha, NE 68134
With only $7G it will be tight, but I think we can make it work. Please make the check out in my name. Thanks.
Actually i think he should put up the money for the equipment then charge for the usage of it. That's called business
In other words, make sure you have all the legal questions handled. Who owns the equipment, what happens in all the worst cases. All those other details your lawyer will make sure you know if you consult him first. Pay for that advice and heed it. Keep his number, odds are you will need it. If he talks you out of this, it is still $200 well spent.
I'll bet your lawyer will make you hire all the wiring. Between floors I'd do it anyway, there are too many legal headaches. (like can you even use the elevator shaft, and if so what wires are required. In the US you cannot, only elevator wires are allowed in the elevator shaft for fire reasons) And remember what the one poster said about using fiber, good idea.
Do a real buisness plan. Run it by a real invester and see if he would be willing to invest money. A real invester/banker will know how to spot details you are handwaving over, things that will come back to haunt you. Baiscly you want to force yourself to answer the hard questions before you commit serious money. If this turns out to be a good idea, great, but if not, you want to know before you end up in court for doing something illegal. (and the landlord testifying that he never gave you permission to use the elevator shaft!)
Kick some ass and take some names. This is the piece to do it.
http://www.vivato.net
Maybe more of you should try to answer his question instead of simply repeating the 'don't waste your money' message. He doesn't need to hear the same advice a hundred times. That being said i echo the ideas about only about 1 per floor being necessary. Living in college i have experiences this a little and it seems that the signal can go well through a few rooms (that counts up and down as well though). depending on the building running cable shouldnt even be that bad either. I suggest you get a little help from these people money wise, at least for the bandwidth such a project will require
Actually, most of the 802.11b spectrum is in the 2.4GHz amateur band.
The are a couple of problems with doing this as a ham radio project though.
1) Everybody would have to have an amateur license.
2) You would have to play by the FCC rules for the amateur service.
I'm sure there are others, but those are the first ones that come to mind.
I dont know why a slashdot user asks such a question, if you read slashdot, normally you would be versed in such a decision. But since you are asking, best you can do with that money is invest into something other than something that will be outdated in a few years.
Wireless isnt the best for gaming, so go the wired route if youre really serious about something like this. Also, consider the fact that if youre going to connect it to the outside world, make sure you have enough bandwith and be able to cover costs.
Seven floors probably means that quite a few people live there, and expect your bandwith to be more than your average dsl/cable connection.
As far as cost, if you want to do go through it, $1000 should be plenty really (wireless), a little less for wired.
That is all.
Dear slashdot,
Recently, due to a family death, I have come into posession of a large sum of money. For reasons that I can not explain I am unable to hold onto this money and that is where I need your assistance. My plan is to purchase wireless network equipment which I will use to improve the quality of life for my people (the other tenants in my building). Upon advisement from you, I will transfer the money to a computer supplier of your choice in return for the goods we decide on. You will receive nothing from this as it is not several million dollars and I am not an African Prince.
Thank you
He has some hot neighbours who he subtly gave webcams to at Christmas and he wants to be in control of their web connections. Simple as that.
I have just moved into my house a couple of months ago. Though it's supposed to be a 3-storey house, there are "technically" 4 levels in the house as each bedroom has its own landing area. So I am speaking with some experiences here.
Prior to the renovation works, I have designed a network infrastructure where my study/guest room has been designated the "server room". During my home renovation, I've requested my electrician, in addition to his other tasks, to lay Cat5e cabling from the guest room to each bedroom.
My advice is, get an experienced electrician to lay the ethernet cables and install the wall mounted patch panels for you. It'll be cheaper (as well as more secure and reliable) in the long run. The solution is neater, and isolating network problems is much easier. The total solution, which comprises of the structured cabling and an all-in-one switch/router/firewall should not exceed your budget of $7000.
Investing your money in wireless equipments at this point does not make economical sense to me as the technology gets old pretty fast. Your users would soon be demanding faster connections once your equipments becomes obsolete.
I have not regretted making this decision ever since, especially during moments when I am doing some critical tasks which require 100% uninterrupted LAN access.
BTW, I am not American. I am a Singaporean.
What you all failed to consider is the geek dimension .
You're better off installing wires, you have better bandwith and much more importantly, it's much more geeky. Face it, while wireless is considered modern and cool and there are some fairly interest aspects regarding singal attentuation and the like, wireless is basically an easy to install technology. Wires require a messy and geeky installation, and that's what we want, right?
With wireless:
- You buy a bunch of little cards and everybody connects
them to their PC. Reboot and run the stupid wizard thingie
and you're done. Boring, boring, boring.
With wires:P.S. This should all be pretty cheap and you should have tons of left over money at the end (expecially if you ask the landlord to help pay for the wires, since all the tenents can use them for their ISDN telephones :). What to do the cash? Duh.. buy
more hardware for that Beawolf cluster, dude!
---- It won't be as bad as you fear or as good as you hope, but it will take twice as long as you plan.
I don't know what the hell everyone's problem is... I guess they expect everyone to be as selfish as they are.
Anyway... for 7K I'd bet you could have this done professionally but if I were going to try it myself, I'd get two or 3 access points (bridges), install them on one floor and arrange them so I get the best coverage. Then I'd duplicate that arrangement on every floor. Assuming I'm going to maintain the wired internet connection, I'd place the WLAN behind a NAT router running DHCP. I'd put my own network behind another router/firewall, adjacent to the WLAN. I'd keep the WLAN open and tell everyone they are on their own as far as security goes and I would provide no support other than keeping the internet connection up and keeping the APs functional. It should be pretty much maintenance free once it's running.
The hardest and possibly most expensive part will be running cables to all the access points. Depending on how your building is constructed you may need more access points.
Good luck.
Compare even a significant loss against the cost of rent and you're better off buying.
Minus fees, maintenance costs, property taxes, and taxes accrued from the property transfer, not necessarily. WHEN its an overpriced market for property ownership, you will sink more money into the property than when you rent. (A landlord is still compelled to make rent competitive with the local market. Sometimes in an overvalued housing market, it means he can't factor in all ownership expenses.) The money not spent in home ownership can be put into stock indexes, and even with taxes, you will still make a profit. If you sell property at the same price you bought it, the money you spent on rent HAS to outperform the market in that timeperiod.
I know too many people who bought property, lost their jobs, and couldn't hold on to the property. All their financial sweat equity went to the bank. I'm not saying you will not be financially ahead by owning property; I'm saying its an investment with its risks, not a sure thing.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
Well, I also didn't see a whole lot of useful comments in response to your question, but you may also want to consider security. I see you're thinking about putting some 802.11b stuff there (probably without support for WPA, but I've seen some with WPA implementations - strange...) which isn't the best way to go for a secure network (unless of course you want to make everybody use VPN).
With that amount of cash to spend you may consider 802.11g (which may improver performance too) and setting up a radius server. That shouldn't raise the costs too much...
Also... Is there really a need for high end solutions? the over the counter crap as you call it could very well be sufficient for your needs (e.g. DLink DI624 router/wireless AP which supports WPA with a raduis server, or WPA-PSK).
You could consider an mobile ad-hoc (MANET) solution such as OLSR og AODV.
check out www.olsr.org and www.aodv.org
Have you asked the people in the building do they want such a service..?
you need to think business..not techie...
1) Do they want such a service..? Go ask them!!!!
2) How much are they willing to pay..?
3) How fast do you get your money back..?
4) What happens when they move out, will the new tenant want your service..?
5) What happens to the service when you move out..? - Can you selling it on to the landlord.
6) Legal stuff you need to have your ass covered.!! - I Can not stress this enough.
I left legal stuff till last, it is most important as it is a business that you are setting up..not just a ISP.
If you are not sure, put the $7K in to a saving account.. go learn about investing/business before offering
any service or investing the money as it may cost you more then $7K.
- Good luck whit what ever you do.
I'm not gonna pretend to be an expert on 802.11 hardware, but I would recommend going with g instead of b. If you want to hold lan parties over this thing, you'll want the extra throughput.
If after setting this up, you want to provide high-speed internet service to the whole appartment as well, you might want to check out Netshare by Speakeasy, which was posted on slashdot a while ago. It should let you recoup some of the cost to spend on more hardware or do something with, or you might be able to use it to convince the landlord to foot some of the bill or something. Good luck!
You can mod your friends, you can mod your nose, but you can't mod your friend's nose.
Well, seriously, maybe access points on the roof of the apartment building would help. One at each corner, preferably with an antenna mounted on a mast a few feet out. If the windows/balcony door do not have wire screens or metallic coatings, the signal may get in and bounce around.
Check the monthly payments for a cheap house and stop renting. Pay the lender for the house, and eventually you stop paying rent. Renters pay for living space but have to do so forever. Phone any realtor and ask for an estimate of payment for entry level home in your area -- in the process of selling houses they know about loans also.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
put in CAT5 cables, add value to building!
...
also in some months 1'000 Mbit gear will
become cheap. so you got the infrastructure
to grow.
methinks a lowly 10 MBit network card
is 15 bucks or something.
you can have a 1'000 Mbit ethernet
card for 47 US$ !!!
gigabit switches for 100 Bucks.
one 8 port switch per floor = 100 bucks
one main trunk (kinda backbone of house)
going thru elevator connecting switch
on every floor.
basement/groundfloor: netgear DM602 modem/
router (80 bucks, 8/1 MBit up down stream)
router/modem = 80 $
2(appartments * 4 (floor) * 47$ (gigabit network
card = 376 $
4 (+1 basement?) * 100$ (gigabit switch) = 400 $
cables = 200 $
Total = 1'056 $ for gigabit-ing a four story
building
laying cable is fun!
waa waa waa, bedoom, tiss!
Nobody is even mentioning that a 1 - 1.5 megabit home service is going to totally suck a donkey's ass with 24 users all connected and pirating MP3s. He might as well just give everyone a year's worth of dialup service, they'll be better off. Notice I'm not quibbling with his desire to share with his neighbours. It's just - is $7000 going to be enough to get more than a month or two of the kind of bandwidth this project will need?
When all those gamers decide to order pizza.
>if you're really serious about wireless you
>should get your fcc technition class lisence,
>it allows you to run your way at up to 1500
>watts, or something rediclus, way better than
>screwing around with fancy antennas for just a
>hundred miliwatts or so.
Jesus H. Christ. That amount of power in the WiFi band would fry deep-frosted chicken (and living human flesh) very nicely. Try reading about satellite ground stations that use gigahertz frequencies and you'll find that even they use just a couple of watts transmitting power.
The secret to a successful
Jaysus, mods, that's not a troll. OT, maybe, but not a troll. Especially because it's true.
Four floors = 4 APs (one of which is a wireless broadband router) (3 *$100 + 1* $200)
6 apts = 6 computers = 6 wireless nics ($50 * 6)
Misc cable and Dilbert doll to sit on main router ($50)
Total = $850 (I think the number will be less if you catch things on sale)
continue to do so.
stop being a tool, buy some land.
Do what makes you happy! I hope you get advice for achieving your goal, not advice on what else to do with the $.
I'm able to receive four neighbors' home wireless networks from my condo. Woudn't it be cool if we could combine into a single network with 4x the speed? Even two would be worthwhile, especially if they were different providers.
"All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke
sucks. Tons of lag. I suggest good ol' CAT 5. Cheap. Get lot's of help from those who you're helping. Maybe a couple wireless AP's but make sure they're secure. IF you have access to the elevator shaft that is a good place to run the cable, usually a conduit for it as a matter of fact. Don't let the nay sayers bring you down, but consider good 'ol cable. It's a little harder to run but is a better deal in the longrun. Especially when gaming.
We have an 8 or 9 story condo complex we do this in. On the roof, we have two radios - one to bring the connection in from our wireless WAN, and one going into a roof-mounted antenna. That antenna is specifically designed for this type of application. It's a cross polarized 180 degree panel antenna. We have a 250mw amplifier sitting between that and a Cisco 340 series AP. About 1/2 way down in one of the customers condos we have a repeater to help the guys in the lower apartments. It works very well. For your application, if you use a low power amplifer (higher power ones may be illegal based on the FCC's ISM-band regulation) and the right antenna, you can probably do this for under $1,000.
If it is easy to run cable between floors and you don't mind some significant labor, a cheap AP on each floor with a good antenna will do very well too. Make sure to pay close attention to your channel plan when installing multiple AP's. Also, never use the built in omni antennas. You can get 6dbi - 8dbi patch antennas for very cheap. Only get enough spread (120-180 degrees I imagine) to cover the area you need to. With 4 floors, I don't see you needing more than one or two access points. A lot of this depends on the building itself. If its a newer building, with the materials used, signal is likely to travel farther.
www.hyperlinktech.com has a very good selection of antennas. We get a number of the ones we use from here. Their tech staff can probably help you with layout and design as well. I don't work for them, I've just had good experience in the past with them.
Another thing to consider is the client cards. Most off the shelf cards have cheap internal antennas and are low power. The Cisco cards we use are 100mw cards.
Having a powerful card for the clients will help quite a bit too. The Cisco 350 series cards are 100mw cards, which is double or more most cheap off-the-shelf cards. You will pay a premium, but you'll have a lot less phone calls from your users about signal dropping out.
Another solution we haven't tried is to actually locate the access point and antenna outside the building, like where the dumpsters are, and focus the signal in from the side through the windows. A WISP friend of ours has done this in a few areas, and has had very good luck covering buildings much larger than yours with just two AP's and sector antennas.
Some people have suggested going with the "G" standard. Considering you are not doing anything that has super high bandwidth use, I would recommend against it. The lower the bandwidth, the better the range. Most all of the access points in our wireless system (well over 50) are running at 5.5mb, or even 2mb. You will have to test and see what works best in your system.
And finally, as many have also said, are you sure you want to do this? Three years ago, my father and I started a wireless ISP as a hobby. We never anticipated getting as big as we have. Trust me when I say it will end up being less of a hobby and more of a job. Even a small network like that will take maintenance, and you will end up doing tech support for the users in the building. If you do move forward, don't spend all of that money. Have the other users and perhaps even the landlord subsidize some of it. You are providing a marketable service that would make your building stand out over others. Don't give that additional marketing power to the landlord for free! Have EVERYTHING down on paper before starting the install. If the equipment is mounted on the landlord's building, there's no other way to prove that it is yours.
Matt
Gaming for all is your guise, but hidden webcams are probably your real motive. ;-)
mmmmmm. but that's just me.
I want to set up a free wireless network in my neighbourhood. I'm glad others are taking the same initiative. To save money, you may want to run a devilinux router to web cache with squid, and prevent users from doing illegal stuff.
___Abuse of power comes as no surprise___
Minnesota's property values are kind of crazy. We bought our house 4 years ago for about 125k. It's now worth more that twice that.
-
"Vengeance is fine," sayeth the Lord.
Wireless may be the 'cool' thing to do, but seriously, it may not be the right technology to use.
Dont 'start with a specific technology in mind and figure out how to apply it' - start with a goal 'share Internet within my building', and then find the right technology.
In this case, I'd seriously look into the feasibility of running ordinary ethernet cabling. The elevator shaft could make a great riser area, if you have access to it, and then you just need to see if there is a way to break out horizontally from there, without having to open up any plaster. If the halls have drop-ceilings, you are pretty much golden.
The cost for a few thousand feet of wire, and the parts and tools to terminate it, is most likely going to be a lot less than the equivalent wireless gear. Then you'll have some left over, to set up some sort of vlan based seperation, so that each apartment is isolated from the network in the other apartments. (and you dont have to worry about people poking around in other people's "Network Neighborhood")
I can't tell you exactly what you need, but I know some guys who can. http://www.shmoo.com/members.html E-mail Bruce Potter or Beetle at the Shmoo group. I met these two at a wireless course recently. They are definitely experts in this field. Beetle runs a wireless ISP for his whole neighborhood, similar to what you're planning to do. As for implementation or money: If you're just talking a wireless LAN so everyone can join games and share things with each other, by all means, that can and should be free to the tenants. If you're talking sharing an internet connection amongst the tenants, then I'd suggest charging a minimal amount to everyone who uses it. The more people use it, the less expensive it is. Business DSL should run about $250 a month, depending upon your service provider. If 25 people use it, just charge $10 each so you can break even, not profit off your neighbors nor keep spending money out of your pocket. If you're talking ISP, that's where Beetle can help you the most. The $7k will get you up and running, but again you need to charge for people to use your internet connection and to provide maintenance for your servers. Personally, the 2nd option is your best bet. Good luck, enjoy your inheritance, and regardless of what anyone else says, it's yours to do with as you wish.
Hey, I doubt that this will even make it into the moderated post list (I joined the thread too late - so sad!), but I'll add it anyway.
I have a wireless LAN in my apt (just for myself) and I live on the top floor of a 3-floor apt. building. I have a *single* Linksys 802.11b Router/AP, and I get a full strength (100%/11Mb) signal down in the basement (it's nice being able to do work and/or game online wirelessly from the basement *heh*).
That being said, your ability to do this will depend highly on the structural materials of your building, as well as partially on the dimensions (for instance - 4 stories you've said - but how many apts per floor?). Some buildings used a wire mesh to do drywall around which is death to wireless.
Cheerios!
Worrying works!! 99% of all the stuff I worry about never happens
Have you spoken to the building's owners? They may not care for your improvements.
Another point - should you move, do you intend to take the system with you? If you're OK with leaving it behind, again, you need to speak with the buildings owners to see if they want it.
Chip H.
You have 7,000 put it to good use as a down payment on a house. That was the best use of 5K I ever spent.
Here's the part of the original post where the request for information comes in:
"I want to know how and what I should buy, to provide wireless access through out the whole building, so we can all share one connection. There are 6 double-room apartments on each side, and we only have four floors. I'll hopefully have access to the elevator shaft, in case I need it. Will $7,000 be enough?" How cheaply could you do something like this, assuming you had access to much of the building? What would be the best way to set up the access points to guarantee the best coverage for the whole building?"
In no part of this does he ask for financial advice. You can take from this that he has $7000 of cash to spend on the personal project of his choice. HIS CHOICE. Not saying I agree with it. Just that I don't have the right to diss it.
Oh, and before I get onto the rest of the rant, I'd be thinking a bunch of wireless cards and one (or maybe two access points/repeaters) per floor for reasonable coverage.
"Um. Seems pretty clear: we know he lives in an apartment, and thinks $7000 is a lot of money."
Not sure what you're trying to say here. That apartment living is for the poor? It all depends on where the flat is and whether he owns it or rents it and what the communal tenancy agreement/factoring arrangements are and many other factors too. All we know is that he got left $7000 and has decided to up his hardware levels.
"Want to play the game some more? He is probably young, else he would not have mentioned the great aunt's death as a novelty. He seems to be unable to scope and budget a wireless network despite being "into computers." He probably has no savings, none, because otherwise he'd have considered this project earlier."
The first part I might be inclined to agree with. On the other hand, I would consider a great aunt's death a novelty since I don't have many of them and they're unlikely to leave me money. Scope and budgeting for a wireless network? Fair enough, but give him some credit - he's asking for advice on it. And it's possible he's finally got to the stage of being comfortable where he is - maybe he's bought his apartment, just been promoted within the company, slowly working his way up the corporate ladder and just got himself a little dog named snuffles - we just don't know. Maybe up until now he's been spending his extra cash looking after his great aunt in her twilight years. He might just want a new project.
Now, I've had my rant. I have to say, you have my every sympathy for having difficult relatives. Not everyone is like them though. Give the guy a chance, y'know?
If you can't think of something nice to say then don't say anything at all. No, REALLY.
After reading through the many replies I have formulated one of my own, and it's not something that hasn't been said by many, many people over the years:
"A fool and his money are soon parted..."
Per building codes, NOTHING is allowed in the elevator shafts or machine rooms except items that directly service the elevator.
Even if the landlord "allows" you to run wire up the elevator shaft, if an elevator inspector finds it, it will surely be YOUR wallet the fine money comes from - there goes that $7k.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
What building do you live in, so I can avoid it next time I'm looking for a new apartment? Jesus. Fucking gamers up until dawn playing Half Life and what not, then going off to school and coming home to puke in the halls. Joy, joy, my ideal living space.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Subject line tells it all.
None of these guys seam like true gamers, I would assume you biggest concern is setting up a huge network internally for playing games within the building. (Might I add.. a nice stage for a huge lan party) If you interested in just having a huge lan.. maybe sharing a bit of connection for your cable/dsl modem... go for it.. true you can't all play online games, but if you have a good group inside to play go for it... If the building wants to use this as their source for internet access that's simple. Share the expense.
I've seen some good ideas, business grade equipment etc... so if you want to share web access get a $300-400 router, get an AP for each floor ($150-250ea) and a box of cables ($60) to run down the elevator shaft.
I'd say for $1500-2000 you can acomplish this all. Then if everyone wants access get them to pay a little each month.. If they're paying 30-50/month if 24 others chipped in you could get $480/month at $20ea. if that isn't enough bandwidth charge more... maybe $40/mo = 960/mo... 24 people can use a single T1 and you can probably get one for approx 600-700/month plus equipment ($1500 or so)
I've done the same job for dozens of business, some that do nothing but download mp3's and play games all day long and all for around 3k in equipment.
Let me know when there is an opening in your apartment... I want to move in! =-)
Like a wise person above said... "Money isn't everything.." So why not get some enjoyment from it...
And finally my rant on the loosers out there.
He should be able to have some fun with his gift and then save the rest of it. As far as it being outdated in a few years SO WHAT! he should've been making a little extra each month off his friends to upgrade it at 24 people, $40/month for internet and a nice 24hour lan, he can make 960 a month... get a t1 for less than 800 and still make ~2k a year off it... guess what.. newer faster wireless or even provide the network cards for everyone!
I think that you mean the 13cm band? 33cm is 900mhz band. Besides being wrong here...let's also consider the PEP (peak envelope power). 1.5KW is WAY too much for the 2.4GHZ band. 100Watts is the maximum and even that is questionable if it exceeds the minimum amount of power output required to communicate. From the FCC's good book:
(d) The transmitter power must not exceed 100 W under any
circumstances. If more than 1 W is used, automatic transmitter control
shall limit output power to that which is required for the
communication. This shall be determined by the use of the ratio,
measured at the receiver, of the received energy per user data bit (Eb)
to the sum of the received power spectral densities of noise
(N0) and co-channel interference (I0). Average
transmitter power over 1 W shall be automatically adjusted to maintain
an Eb/ (N0 + I0) ratio of no more than 23 dB at
the intended receiver.
I've been to Saskatchewan. And I was truly apalled at how cheap property was. Coming from the SF bay area, it was a real eye-opener to see how far my monthly rent would have gone there.
I briefly flirted w/ the idea of buying the province w/ some of the money in my 401(k)
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
I build a WISP for $3500 that covers 8sq miles. Each relay was $1000 and I have 3 of them. I'm sure you don't need as much for a single apartment building. I even have a 50 foot tower in that cost. I pay about $700 a month for a Frame Relay (T1 is $1300). I have 43 customers so far and plenty of bandwidth for Playstations and PC games.
Have fun.
The above is not worth reading.
You conveniently ignore the fact that mortgage interest is tax-deductible. This is a huge and often overlooked factor. Rent is only deductible on local taxes and generally has a pitifully low cap.
More than the number of rooms in the building, you should ask how many people you're gonna have to serve and what your ultimate connection is to the Internet. THAT is going to determine what sort of router/hub arrangement you'll need.
Also is this a wood-frame building or steel and concrete? You may find it cheaper and more reliable to run Cat 5 to each apartment given the signal attenuation problems you might have with wireless.
If you're determined to do wireless, you might want to check into many of the do-it-yourself community WAP antenna configurations.
Somebody recently wrote an article that basically stated the cost of billing for wireless service basically outweighs the amount of money people are willing to pay for the service. He was predicting the death of T-Mobile and Wayport-type hotspots, but it's kind of true when you come down to it. Especially since accepting money for service implicitly implies providing the support required to use it.
There are plenty of WISP forums with lots of good documentation that will help you out. Wiring up and down levels is pretty difficult. A low gain omnidirectional antenna is still not quite a sphere in terms of coverage. The higher gain you go, the more the coverage area starts to look like a squished donut. That necessitates an AP on each floor, which introduces the problem of backbone wiring to link them all together. You then run into roaming and interference issues. All items that can technically be solved, but at significantly more cost and aggravation that a single AP hotspot.
Best of luck... please let us know if you proceed!
--D
I have been hearing about mesh neworks lately used to get entire hotels online in very little time and with few access points. So I would think that this is just a smaller scale version of that. There are a few mesh networking products out there and may be a good solution to your problem.
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Hello,
I work for a consulting company and we just deployed wireless to a hotel. We use Cisco 1100 WAPs and a Catalyst switch. We installed 3 access points spread out across the main floor and had very good signal strength through the first and second floors. We had fair signal strength on the 3rd and 4th floor.
Cisco 1100 WAPs (part# AIR-AP1120B-A-K9) - $400 each x 3 = $1200
Catalyst 2950 (part# WS-C2950-24) - $ 650 each x 1 = $650
Cisco PCMCIA wireless cards (part# AIR-PCM352) - $100 x 5 = $500
Total = $2350
Keep in mind these are high end products but for the best wireless signals I would definitly go Cisco.
For detailed pricing go to http://ibuyer.net/ and enter the part numbers.
Good luck!
If you can gain access to the elevator shaft I'd see about running conduit (to cut out electrical noise from the motors) between each of the floors and whichever floor where the broadband connection is going to be setup on. Run CAT5 thru the conduits so you can wire up an access point on each floor. Have all the cables terminate at a Router (I've had good experiences with Linksys). Turn off SSID Broadcast and enable WEP. You should also consider getting the MAC's of everyone in your building and adding those to the list of clients that can get an address (Linksys has this feature iirc) so you can cut down on wardriving.
Hope this helps!
Going multi-floor brings up legal issues.
One biggie is regarding the elevator shaft. Nothing is permited in an elevator shaft that is not directly related to the operation of the elevator.
There are some cable tray limits on the use of class 2 wireing in conduit and cable trays in an elevator access shaft which can be used for networking. Check the National Electrical Code and any local ordnances that may apply. The easiest way to check this is hire an electrician as a consultant that does class 2 electrical work if you plan on pulling the wire yourself.
The truth shall set you free!
Check out how we constructed a 100 Mbps fiber optic network to 60+ bungalows!
http://www.bjornerback.com/tomas/mattgrand
I have 1 Gbps Internet access@home
You know, if the building is new enough to have at least cat3/cat5 wiring and you have access to the telecommunication closets, I would install a switch in each closet and use the internal wiring in the building. It could be as simple as cutting one end of the patch cable off, punching it down on the bix and pluggint the other end into the switch.
In the suite, replace the telephone jack with both a rj45 and rj11 jack.
Nearly fall out of my chair when I see people talking about 200k for just a house... are you people fricken nuts! 200k can get me a 650+ acre farm with the house, sheds garages and even some of the machinery! Dang.. 200k for a house.. rediculous.
~~ Please keep your arms, legs, and outright stupidity inside the ride at all times. Thank You ~~
We considered doing something similar in a block of units around here. One of our clients builds radio towers for a living - he suggested that the best way to get coverage and not have it stray out of bounds was to install a leaky coax feed all down the elevator shaft. That way the signal can be picked up from the inside sections of any unit and not outside the walls. Not sure how you make a leaky coax cable, but I am sure google could help you out.
The thing to keep in mind is to not go overboard on your loan. First, find out what your maximum loan can be (go to a trusted mortgage agent), then lop $50,000 off the top, and get a loan for that amount. Most of the time, they will want to mortgage your ass into the ground, and make you live month-to-month - you don't want to do that.
Take the $7000, put it into a money-market account, let it sit for a few months (while you look for a house), then use $5000 or so for down payment, closing costs, etc to move into your home. Leave the other $2000 in the account (its a SAVINGS account - start now, start early!). Any extra money? Drop it into the account.
I definitely *would not* spend the money on a wireless access system - unless I owned the property myself. Leasing/renting is *slavery*, IMNSHO - you *are* flushing money down the toilet. It would be better to buy a home or some other property than leasing. Right now is the time to do it, before interest rates pop back up to 10-15 percent - you will be kicking yourself that you didn't take advantage of the situation, it will likely be many long years before you see this situation again (if ever?). Meanwhile, others will be smug in their knowledge that they got their home loans at 5-7 percent FIXED (don't do that variable crap).
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
If Jesus Christ were born in our time, you'd all be calling him a fucking idiot.
Jesus did things without caring if he would be appreciated for them. We view this behavior as God-like in that context. But in today's world, a person trying to do the same is treated like an imbecile, or accused of being naive. "A fool and his money..." Maybe the fool understands something about money that you don't. Maybe you're the fool.
Our individualism in this country is a strength, but simultaneously it makes us all assholes.
How about you all shut up? He's a far better man than any of you will ever be. That is, if he's serious.
I say this and I'm not even Christian.
Oh, and don't try to deflect my point by saying he's investing in technology that will soon be obsolete. You'd be railing on him equally hard if he'd simply decided to divvy up the $7k amongst his neighbors.
There was a story a few months back (can't find it, though, too many other stories on wi-fi) where a guy covered an entire apartment block with two access points - one on each side of the building. Since Wi-fi works line-of-sight, if the tenants could see the access point from their windows, they can use it. I don't know what's across the street from your place, but you could mount it in a tree, power it from a street lamp or from an adjacent building, and use it as a repeater for one or more trunks you have set up to your internet connection inside.
Of course, this will just give people access... not necessarily good bandwidth since everyone has to share. But I imagine your internet connection is a smaller link than the Wi-fi anyway. This would be a good, cheap start... you wouldn't have to spend much wiring up the building (I don't really see you getting much further with only $7k). You can always spend the rest of the money on upgrades later.
The aggravation that goes with wireless is unparallel, save yourself a stroke and lots of money by buying a few spools of CAT wire and a HUB/Router in one, a crimping tool, and some connectors and have at it. Run the wires and you will thank me in the end cause there is nothing like a good wire compared to having bad signal strength (which is unavoidable in your situation believe me)
Trix are for kids!
I don't know much about wireless. But I have heard Proxim makes the best equipment.
I setup a wireless network on a 6 story building that had reinforced-concrete walls and 8 apartments on each floor. I used 6 WAPs and 1 home router/ip-sharing/NAT device. It worked...but not very well(because of the router).
The elevator shaft is a big no-no for WAPs, because you'll get no signal. You'll probably have to put one WAP on each side of the floor (assuming your elevator is in the middle). To hook them together, I put a switch on the 3rd floor and ran 3 cables up and 3 down.
Didn't really have any problems because no one was a heavy downloader. However, the POS router that I got needed to be reset every week. Also, the coverage was spotty at the ends of the floors.
I am the Manager of elevators at a major University in the US. I am considering using wireless technology for in the cab security cameras and am familiar with the laws regulating elevators and with electronics. It is strictly prohibited by law to place any equipment that is not expressly elevator related anywhere in the elevator hoistway, elevtor machine room or in the elevator cab or atop the cab. Electronic equipment near the elevator is unwise because the transmissions could possibly affect the electronic components of the elevator. Today's elevator's, even in older buildings, are usually fully electronic and utilize complex electronic monitoring and diagnostic systems, with a PC permanently affixed to each electronic controller. You may experience some EMF interference in your system because electric and hydraulic elevators typically run on 480 volts. You can contact the manufacturer of the elevator in your building and they can tell you if there will be any problem with interference and may gladly provide you with information to avoid any complications with your installation, or with accidentially scrambling an $80,000 elevator controller. You will not be able to sneak your equipment into the hositway or on top of the cab because elevators are inspected in residential buildings by State inspectors twice per year, and they usually just rip out and destroy any non-elevator related items; elevator rules are generally the same everywhere in the US and Canada. Sounds like a great project, hope that I have helped you avoid a pitfall.
Did anyone else think of debian when they saw the word apt in the story title? :)
My Gawd WTF...
You moderators are fucking gay as hell. This is a fucking troll. The above post wasn't a fucking troll. Why don't you stop jerking off, get your head out of your ass, and read the posts before you mod them as trolls.
yes 1500 watts would cook you quite niceley, but I absolutley do not recomend it, 5-10 watts is plenty for nearley any kind of long range wireless project.
Also I suggested getting the lisence beceause studying for it opens up the door to understanding how radio works, also it's a great way to get to know your local ham comunity, and it allows you to operate at higher power, wich is really just a fringe benifit.
Well art is art isn't it, but then again water is water; and east is east; and west is west; and if you take cranberries