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Temporary Wireless Service For An Outdoors Event?
SBECK writes "I've been asked to come up with an estimate of how much it would cost to provide wireless internet service for a small convention being held at a campground. That would entail renting or buying enough wireless access points to give coverage to the area and getting temporary satellite Internet service. Unfortunately, I've never done any of this, so I'm floundering. I'd love to get some pointers from anyone who has any experience setting up something like this. What ISP services provide temporary satellite service for something like this?"
The first thing you need to find out is if the campground has power available. If it doesn't, then the cost of this project will go way up.
not so atleast in Australia you can get two way satellite latency is terribly but throughput is supposed to be very good
I would recommend using cheap AP's designed for home use and a third party firmware that allows them to link up and form a mesh.
The Linksys WRT54G is about $70 or less on Amazon and with third party firmware it can be linked into a mesh using something called WDS.
You can also add PoE and larger antennas quite reasonably.
See the Sveasoft site for more information.
Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
William Shakespeare
Not unless you are using older equipment. Newer equipment can uplink to the satalite as well as downlink from it.
Bi-directional has been available for a few years now. Sheesh I get enough spam for it in my mailbox, some of it from my isp(earthlink) who also sends adds for dsl, which isn't available within my zip or and of the neighboring zips.
Mycroft
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
Get the WiFi cyclist to park his bike and shout him a few beers.
-Copyright law #69:Whenever Mickey Mouse is about to enter the public domain,copyrights get extended by 25 years.
you should check out psand(http://wireless.psand.net/) who have been doing this at various outside events and festivals in the UK using satelite to get conectivity. They are a very frendly bunch (I met one of them in Bristol, UK) and I am sure they would love to talk to you. I think they were involved with C4's Big Brother House Reality TV thing also. They even had a tricicly with wierless access. "To visit our general Internet and network services web site click here. Internet connectivity has become an integral addition to the majority of outdoor events, both as a service for public and professionals, and as an essential part of the event organisation. As many outdoor events take place in rural areas, establishing the set-up for Internet connectivity often requires installation of a cabled network, which can be both expensive and time-consuming. Psand.net specialises in satellite and wireless communication networks. As a fully self-contained mobile unit, we are able to arrive on site before or during your event, and establish a fast, reliable and cost-effective Internet connectivity network in a matter of hours, without the need for cabling or any other installations. In the summer of 2002, we provided Internet connectivity at a number of large-scale weekend festivals in the UK. Using our innovative technology, we provided an Internet café, as well as the facilities for media streaming and live radio broadcast to web."
Grab a DW6000 from Direcway. Bi-directional satellite (no analog or isdn uplink needed) and provides you and ethernet port. Put either a router on preferably a transparent proxy server on it and connect up your access points on the other side. Make sure you have an UPS for each access point in addition to the one for your server/satellite.
-Pascal
Camp Area... Wireless Access... what you really need is this.
Here in Pasadena, many people who live the in the homes surrounding the Rose Bowl will sell your wireless connections during an event that are easily available near the parking lots. The connections go anywhere from $100 to as low as $10 for an IP. It can be very handy!
Personally, I use my cell/Palm-PDA to surf when I'm away from home/work. I love my Samsung i500!!!!
I don't know much about this kind of technology, but I know that there are similar setups going on at the Burning Man festival every year. Maybe it's worth looking around the site to see if you can find anecdotes and contact info for people who've done the same.
Also, the Mars Society uses satellite hookups to keep in touch with its field stations. Perhaps they can give you some pointers?
Depending on where the event is held and how well cellphone signals can be received, you might also want to try a mobile phone carrier. A lot of the larger UK events like Glastonbury are, I believe, getting support in this area from larger telcos. It may be more complex, and will probably involve getting everyone a new PCMCIA card, but it could be an option.
Sorry I couldn't be of more help; sadly IANA techie, but I hope these couple of snippets I've seen around the net are of use to you.
"It is dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue." -- Zork
Have you thought of checking the hills in and around the campground to see if any of them have line of sight into a town?
You may only need 2 directional antenas instead of a satilite uplink.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." -Plato
for a small convention being held at a campground
Use their Trekie Communicators.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
- how big is the camping ground you are holding the event?
- what speed would you like to give? AP's should be 802.11b/g compliant (more expensive) for compatibility
try to team up with a provider of some sorts, and get some sponsored stuff. They provide the internet connectivity (and get free PR), you just deal with the local problem (in your case the WiFi stuff).I've organised a few LAN-parties (up to ~250 attendants) and providers are more than willing to help you out. Also talk to one of your local IT shops, they usually don't mind you using their stock for this kind of event for a small rental fee. As an example: for a LAN-party for 100 participants we paid about 200,-- in fees for the whole network infrastructure & server park. We got to use 3 3com superstack switches and 5 dual xeon servers. The internet router (cisco 2600 series) was provided by the ISP. We just hooked the stuff up & had a great party. The help provided by both the ISP & the IT-shop was tremendous. All the help we got was from volunteers of those companies... they only asked free entrance in the gaming contest in return. Oh, and some beers :).
The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.
One thing to consider is whether the radio client dewvices are going to be sttic (like laptops left setup on a desk) or mobile (like handheld PDA's for example)
If you are having static devices that get setup, connected then left in place for the duration then you can get away with using cheaper network switches. However, if youa re using mainly mobile devices then you can get disconnections as the user roams between access points on different cheaper switches.
This has happened to some of our customers using handheld barcode scanners as they network equuipment could not perform the handoff between access pints quick enough, logging the radio user off.
Not really directly answering your question but its something to consider.
I have no sig yet I must scream.
Even for satellite providers, you will need some sort of uplink like an ISDN or analog line
Sorry, this is wrong. Check out DirecWay for at least one provider for 2 way sat comms.
It depends on the country that you are in..but most of the small sercice providers will be able to help sort something like that out for you.. try talking to them..if they can not help directly they most likey know a company that can.
Even if you offer them a stand at the event to allow them to show off their services, you can probley get them to help out!!!
I know the manager, but not sure if they have what you need.
http://www.eurorent.ie
Also, try to stick with as few different vendors as possible. That way, you won't introduce unnecessary incompatibilities and you won't have to deal with different setups and configurations (that may not be such a big problem as long as you stick to using SoHo equipment, as it's usually fairly standard-compliant and easily configured through a web interface).
If your conference is really out in the middle of nowhere though consider turning to the pros. I have worked with T-Mobile techs on providing Internet access at an outdoor sports event in a fairly secluded area and have nothing but good things to say about them. Since there were no landlines and no WiFi coverage available we basically had to rely on cell transmissions. So we setup a IEEE 802.11 network and they provided the cell-phone backend. We had to put in a few restrictions (bandwidth throttling, etc) to ensure that the network was reasonably secure and to keep costs in check but it did work like a charm. Of course, that might not be an option depending on your choice of locale and your budget.
What kind of gathering is it? I dunno about the satellite link, but perhaps you could get your WiFi base stations to be sponsored by some manufacturer or ISP...
"WiFi hotspot courtesy of Apple|Linksys|Lucent" blah blah blah... I know in France, Apple sponsors big events organized by the municipality and lends quite a lot of equipment. Maybe you should try.
Hello! I'm a disaster waiting to happen!
There are plenty of open source solutions for setting up a mesh network, some of which are covered here.
Thomas Krag & Co. also maintain a wiki that you may find useful.
Mobile Mesh runs in user-land and is covered by the GPL. It seems to get the best reviews.
-- Douglas
if you have enough clients the network will create itself.
Last year at the Mid Atlantic Star Party, directway was gatewayed into a field near Robbins, NC for a large group of amateur astronomers. www.masp.org now has the plans for 2004 and the 'internet' activity links to an invalid page. It worked quite well. They used an MS box for the gw, you could use the dw6000, I suppose, to better advantage. They also had multiple linux boxes running local web servering and the like. Not sure if they used squid or what but if so, it was a transparent proxy method. Cheers, Russ
http://www.skycasters.com/portable-transportable.h tml
I personally tested a unit and it met my needs nicely. Takes very little power and meets FCC regs for installation without a technician. (Self aiming system.)
Best regards,
Al
Not all camp grounds have electricity. Sure, the nice little parks with all the slotted out areas have them. But, there are many camping areas back in the woods that don't have power. And they are areas for camping. I know, I have gone there. I first went with the boy scouts as a kid.
Evolution or ID?
Try Starband for 700-800ms latency. Reasonably reliable IP service for an office of 8 users in very remote Colorado mountain country, although their call center blows chunks. I can even VNC (through SSH) to that office, it's slow but the link doesn't drop and it's useable.
--
Karma and Foes, who cares.
The Soapbox company specializes in portable connectivity. They mainly do political events, but from their info page it looks like they could set up pretty much anywhere.
You never stated where the event is or how much bandwidth is needed..
.. use external antennas on the AP's not the duckies that are standard.. oh and you would be suprised at the distance the signal will travel in an open area with no interferance from other singles.
Some cases you can have the phone company provision a line to the site (though you generally need a few weeks to make this happen). It is possible that the site already has phone/dsl service (unless it's out in the middle of nowhere).
One of the best options is to see if there is a wireless provider in the area and back haul a connection from them, in some cases there are many free/opensource type communities that run their own wireless core network. Look at settle wireless or the BAWUG (Bay area wireless user group) as they have done point to point backhauls to a park so everyone could surf while they were there... backhaul with some good equipment then use some dlinks or linksys units for the WLAN
Make sure AP's and backhaul are on seperate channels too..seen some people doing backhaul with 802.11a equipment (modifed) which is sometimes cheap to buy, and less bleedover signal in the spectrum. Oh.. lastly.. Trees are not your friend! they will kill your signal, don't bother trying to do this in a forest.
-b
Our company did this for some golf tournaments we were running. We found that we definitely needed some access points that could hop from access point to another so that we could really extend the range.
One problem with "hopping" is that occasionally if one of the access points in the middle of the link goes down, you may need to reset each of the other AP's down the line to get them back up and running.
We also ran into some interesting problems such as the time that around 8am in the morning our coverage started dropping when all the houses around the course started turning on their microwaves. You can never guarantee that the coverage you have at one time will be consistent throughout the day.
Along with a power supply and an access point, we also bought these special antennas that could be attached to camera tripods to give us a mini cell tower like setup. Oh yeah, and lesson learned, don't take those down during a thunderstorm.
Adventure City Tours
Forget the sharks. If you have line of sight between your site and another site that has the bandwidth, consider using lasers to bridge the last few miles. You can get over a 100Mbit that way. This article is a summary of what's possible right now with "free space optics":s /19_2/emer ging-tech/23327-1.html
_ canobeam/ canobeam/
e _Optics_T erabeam.html
http://www.washingtontechnology.com/new
Here are Cannon's frickin' lasers:
http://www.usa.canon.com/html/industrial
Terabeam Elliptica, plus links to other free fpace optics:
http://www.freespaceoptics.com/Free_Spac
Sometimes I worry that I'll develop Alzheimer's disease, but no one will notice.
A buddy of mine who travels a lot has a Sprint card in his laptop for wireless Internet via the cell phone network. For $80/month he gets unlimited amount of data transfer (all-you-can-eat he calls it) and around most major metropolitan areas, and even around most isolated towns of at least ~100K population that have a Sprint network coverage, he gets around 700-800kbps. With this connected to a laptop running Win XP (sorry, the Sprint card and service seem to only support MS Windows o/s) and Internet Connection Sharing (Windows' NAT) and a Linksys WAP connected a good "outdoor" omni antenna (see http://www.fab-corp.com and look at the 12.5db omni with 3 degree down-tilt omni) on a ~20-30 foot antenna pole, you could probably cover the whole campground.
Check out the Transportable Satellite Internet System. It looks like exactly what you are looking for.
I've seen the output from a rental Honda generator on an oscilloscope and it's pretty clean too. I use two of these generators to power sound (about 3kW of amplifier output) and computer equipment for five hours on a parade float in the summer with no problems.
Add a double-conversion UPS (probably you already have one in your office) between the generator and your equipment and that will let you refuel the generator without shutting all your equipment down.
Putting moderation advice in your
Motosat is a company in Utah that provides steerable Directway dishes for installation on RV's. I have one. My unit works in any campground where we can get a clear view of the sky. Even the most lovely forested places generaly have one or two sites that work. In my unit, I run the system to a Apple Airport base station which provides wifi connection for the immediate vacinity. Depending on how much bandwidth you need, something like this, with Airport Extreme base stations or equivalent hardware to act as repeaters might do the job. The trick is finding one of the thousands of snowbirds who might be willing to rent the services to you. http://www.motosat.com/
Last year was my first burn - of the many, many things that impressed me, the fact that I was able to email from such a remote place (ok, not that remote - not like Antarctica or something) is something I will never forget. I would say that if you want to find out how to do this - you might start here...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon