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Building an Non-Wired Network for Pueblos?
wsxian asks: "We recently received a large grant to install a wireless high speed Internet system for our entire Pueblo here in the State of NM. This would encompass about 150 homes and the range from a central point would be no more than 6 miles, but there are hills, valleys and trees so line of sight is not an option unless we decide to drop homes. I welcome any suggestions for technology to look at, what to avoid, security concerns- and most important for us what companies to avoid. If any of you have had real life experience with doing such a scaled project like this, please give your input!"
First thing to test: can a signal get through a three-foot-thick wall made of compacted and hardened mud?
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
Take a look at the mesh networking stuff. Do not think about having one central access point. Every home should have it's own node on the mesh.
Amazing fact: Housing in NM are often made with stuff like 2x4's, sheetrock, and plywood, somewhat like houses throughout the US!
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
No matter what anyone tells you, or tries to sell you: wireless is line-of-sight. Microwaves are electromagnetic radation. They do penetrate a bit better than the visible wavelenghts, but a building or a hill, heck even trees, will put a real cramp on your transmissions.
If all buildings don't have a clear, unobstructed view of a central point; the only way to make this work is to connect the buildings that can see eachother until you reach one that can see your point of origin.
Start by finding the best location that is the most visible, and most central to the most buildings. This is were you will install six radios each with a 60 degree sector antenna on a tower (less if you don't need a full 360 coverage, but don't go any wider then 60 degrees for each sector, or you'll be spreading your power too thin). Then survey each of the other locations to see which have perfect views of this tower. These locations will get an uplink radio with a unidirectional antenna focused on the tower. Plus a second radio operating in a different frequency range with an omnidirectional antenna. Try to use a lower frequency for the omni radios. These secondary radios will operate as a mesh network to pick up the other buildings that don't have line-of-sight to the central point. Finally the non-line-of-sight meshed-in locations can operate on their own omnidirectional antenna if they are close enough so they can pick up tertiary meshes. You really don't want to go any deeper than three into the mesh, speed starts to suffer too much. If the buildings are more than a couple hundred feet from each other the powerloss from transmitting in all directions will be too much and you'll have to go to directionalized antanna at one or both locations to direct the RF in a more focused pattern.
...the first serious effort to install wireless (not counting the expensive and limited cellphone guys) is being done using motorola canopy tech. Last I talked to them they were putting it up two weeks ago so I don't know the status yet. I have no other information on it other than the guys doing it decided after a lot of looking that it would work the best for the long distance and hills and trees around here. They were running 802.11 at a truckstop, but the range was extremely limited, basically the parking lot and a little more. They wanted something better and *now*, not wait for wimax or whatever other blimp in the sky scheme is coming, and 802.11xx just don't cut the mustard without quite a few access points. I have no idea what it costs or the hardware requirements, but that should be easy enough to find out at motorola's site. If it works and I can get broadband from those guys, they get my loot. There's been no offers from anyone else for any broadband around here, not even lowest common denominator xDSL. With that said, two different additional satellite providers are scheduled to start offering services soon, so there will be some competition there as well, but that's later this summer last I checked on that.
It is good to know that you had a full plan enumerating feasability, options considered, and implementation plan prior to receiving this grant. Thank goodness our grant administration is on the ball!
Thanks a lot, submitter. I'll remember you next time I'm in the voting booth. Whereas I used to vote straight (or almost straight) Republican, I've been mixed between Libertarian and Republican for the last several years. I think it's time to go 100% Libertarian so that leeches like you can pay for your own damn internet access, just like I do.
Please mod me -1, Overtaxed. Failing that, Flamebait, Troll, or Overrated will be accepted.
-paul
Pistol caliber is like religion: everyone has their favourite, and theirs is the only right choice.
If there is existing cellular coverage in the area, consider using that as an alternative to creating a new infrastructure. It may be possible to exploit the existing network with fewer additions than starting from scratch will require.
These guys created a free wireless network in Austin in less than 6 months, and they recycle old PCs in many of their installations. Definitely worth checking out!
http://www.lessnetworks.com/
Someone stole my old sig.
Check out http://www.vivato.com/. I have been installing their products, and recently did a baseball stadium. The signal penetrated the concrete construction into the team offices behind the dugout. Good stuff.
I'm a happy pessimist. I expect and prepare for the worst, when it doesn't happen I am pleasantly surprised.
802.16 (maybe even 802.11b) & a small blimp, like the ones used by car dealerships. Use strategically-placed ground nodes to connect homes via UTP.
Just wondering if you could get GIS data from the County or Feds and use that when planing your system.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Another person pointed out that grants do not always come from the government. True, but the word generally connotes government sources, otherwise it would be "hired," "retained," or "paid." Grants are "free" money, and nobody gives out "free" money except the government, which can steal or print (same difference) it at will. (Well, OK, some community orgs give out "free" money, too, but it pales compared to the collective Sugar Daddy that the governments have become.)
Now, setting aside the source of the money, you are right: his two questions are valid. I made no effort to answer them, because when he asks about "security" in the same sentence as "wireless," he's already asking an unanswerable question. I think once this guy's project is done, I'll go visit with a laptop and a copy of AirPwn (google it).
My point remains: if the people in the pueblo want the access, why aren't they paying for it, instead of having someone else foot the bill?
I am now officially off-topic. Please mod as such.
-paul
Pistol caliber is like religion: everyone has their favourite, and theirs is the only right choice.
You have to put one on top of every single hill between you and the next signal. It's line of sight, remember? then what, cut down a million trees in the way as well? And those hills, where's the power coming from? And who owns all those hills and would you have to cut them a check for access? I run solar, I know exactly what it costs, your talking another grand minimum per access point, and you would need hundreds of them to blanket just a piece of a rural county if there's a lot of hills and trees in the way, or erect a ton of giant towers, also expensive and tedious.
Naw, 802.11x was designed for close range and like those "starbucks" you city guys (if you are, I don't know) go hang out at. Out in the rural areas it's a completely different ball game. These guys I'm talking about have *already* been running 802.11 for a few years now, commercially, just it only hits a limited clientele and the range is dismally short and they want to be the first people to offer everyone else some broadband alround here, because no one else has even attempted it. Doing it with the short range stuff is either wickedly expensive, OR leaves out thousands of people that can't get it. We already have that problem, we _can not_ get broadband. No cable, no dsl, no nuthin except satellite and even that is an expensive buggy limited PITA. If it was practical and possible to do it real cheap and have it good and available to thousands of potential customers they would have jumped on it, but it just *ain't* practical for all situations out there. It's one thing to say "stick up some x-hundreds more access points" quite another to fund that and pull it off, when you only need one or two of the designed for longer range points to hit potentially thousands of people. That's why they decided on it. Heck, they had VCs laughing at them when they even mentioned 802.11, because the money guys know what might work and turn a profit and what won't, especially since the dot bomb years.
I know what you are saying about propietary this or that, well, even 802.11 is propietary in a way, you MUST follow the dictates of the FCC, it can only be extremely low power, on freqs that suck for penetrating foliage, etc,, and that's just that, combo of engineering and laws. And it sucks for useful range in a lot of situations people face, like around here, conditions that would apply over buhzillions of square miles in the US right now. So there's not a lot of alternatives out there. If you got one, some cheaper easier and more open way to provide broadband over a huge area in hills and trees, let's see a link to this miracle tech, I'd be interested in it.
Here is a topo map (albeit from 1977) of the area. Hopefully this will help in offering him insight on setting up the network.
I live in Manassas, Virginia which is the first US city to deploy BPL technology. The city has partnered with a company called COMTek, Inc. to supply the equipment and run their billing.
:o)
I went to a demonstration with City officials and COMTek engineers and it was VERY impressive. Their technology will interoperate with any other TCP/IP transport (cellular radio, fiber, copper, etc.) and, in fact, Manassas uses fiber for their long haul.
Comtek said that you can currently get 4 megabit to end users and with repeaters can push about six miles. At least, I think it was six miles, it's been a little while. Buy anyway, you can use radio to bridge long line of sight gaps, then stick a BPL inducer on a nearby transformer and light up any house within a mile of it, easily.
One thing they did in downtown Manassas was light up a building w/ BPL and put a wifi hot-spot on the roof which gives downtown strollers high speed wireless Internet (as long as you are a subscriber
The technology is very flexible and very stable in a wide range of temperatures which is ideal for New Mexico. The BPL "modems" (for lack of a better term) cost around $200 a piece retail and the inducers can be installed on power transformers in about 30 minutes, so it is a very rapid deployment.
Oh, and COMTek had installed some hardware that looked for amateur radio operators and dropped pieces of their spectrum so that they wouldn't interfere with them. I thought that was pretty cool of them as it does slightly lower their overall capacity, but not by much.
Good luck!
When you do your design (there are good posts on the subject that I won't repeat) consider power. If the weather in your area is typical for deserts (I don't know where in NM you live so this might or might not be the case) you can put up solarcells and batteries everyplace where you need power. You might even be able to get an extra grant from someone by demoing that it can be done. (Even if there are a lot of clouds you might consider it)
by Ackmo (700165) on Friday March 18, @03:14PM (#11978946)
Yes it can, but you can only use it to transmit Postscript and PDF files.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
It sounds like an illegeal mexican immigrant, but I'm probably wrong?
The radio named in the Subj has
10 watts of transmitter output,
even before antenna gain is ta-
ken into consideration
The repeaters should help handle
the uneven topography.
Next problem...
I work for a WISP and would suggest that you look into 900 MHz for your system. 900 MHz is not pure line of sight and gives you about a five mile range from tower to end user modem to work with. We have WaveRider equipment deployed (www.waverider.com) and have had good results from it. Internal and external antenna installations are both options.
One thing I would recommend is having an experienced professional do the network design. It's one thing to slap a 802.11x WAP into a building and plug it into the DSL modem and something very, very different to design a wireless WAN that will actually work.
The smartest man in the whole, wide world really don't know that much. - Mose Allison
http://www.locustworld.com/ Regular wireless vendors don't like mesh because it doesn't provide the same central control. But for a community where the people who use the service are the same ones who provide the service, you could create a kick-ass network with a bunch of "backhaul" points via wireless backhaul or DSLs.
Vendors will talk you out of it though.
Native America communities have alot of poverty, but since they are independant of and unencumbered by the the "rules" and norms that slow down other communities, they have the opportunity to do very innovative things.
IPSS: IP via Smoke Signals.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
use locustworld meshbox routers 200mw and 8dbi omnis
use senao 200mw bridges for your clients. You will get 600-800ft nlos signal to clients and great links to your repeater and uplink nodes.
To help fill in the basic gaps, go take a look at Building Wireless Community Networks, Wireless Hacks, as well as the larger city and national groups Seattle Wireless and NYC Wireless. Go to NYC Wireless for the tools and the user groups, go to Seattle Wireless to see if you want to add affiliate services.
Hills or a maze of skysrapers...each have line of sight problems. There are plenty of answers out there and it doesn't take high end equipment or experts to pull this off...though it does take time, tweaking, and a reasonable amount of planning.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
It was from the Gov - Rural development.
You'll need to look at high gain antennas and repeaters to make a system like this work. You'll probably also need some mast-work to get signals broadcast over the hills. Wi-Fi might not be what you need to get the job done, so you'll want to look at other wireless technologies.
It sounds like an interesting project. You'll probably want to post a web-site showing how you implemented it; It could prove useful to other groups trying to accomplish the same things in rural areas.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.