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Parent-Friendly Wireless Bridge To Span 500 Meters?
GonnaBRichYeahYeah! writes "My dad lives down a dirt road 500 meters off the main road. The cable company will not put cable down his lane for any less than the ridiculous sum of $10,000.
And he cannot get phone line DSL since he is so far away from the central terminal, so he relied on painful 22k/sec dial-up for access to the Internet.
He got sick of it and relies on Hughes satellite Internet, at $60/month, but he still has to be connected to a phone line to upload to the Internet. It's not a good solution, but better than dial-up.
His friend lives on the corner of the main drag with his lane and has cable, thus hi-speed Internet.
I suggested that he get a wireless access point, and put it at his friend's house and then get a wireless card for access. The problem is that no wireless routers go that far (max range of -N is 200 feet) and WiMax is too complex for a 70-year old man. Any suggestions from Slashdot crowd would be helpful." Plenty of people make wireless links over longer distances, but often they're not suited for people who want simplicity and reliability. What's the best out there right now?
Check local legislation. Where I live, the government must provide electricity, water, and telephone service to any legal building built, no matter how far into the boondocks it is built. I don't know if the law specifically applies to high-speed internet access, but I'm fairly confident that a good lawyer could make it seem that way.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
I'm just about to the point where I hate wireless, but for a non-commercial shot like this, mikrotik should work well. You could get into it for 300.00 - 600.00 for a couple of units configured as a wireless bridge.
I recommend using Ubiquity sR2 or SR5 mini-pci cards...and ground everything especially well.
Mikrotik boards run Linux and are extremely roboust and feature rich. But you can follow this wiki and have a transparent bridge running in no time flat:
http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Transparently_Bridge_two_Networks
We use mikrotik a lot in a wireless WISP situation. If someone thinks they are going to throw a bunch of this stuff hundreds of feet in the air and make a lot of money doing wireless Internet, they are in for a wild ride...that ends somewhere between hairloss and a straight jacket...but I do something almost exactly like what you are wanting to do with your father using Mikrotik, and it has worked very well and wasn't super expensive.
Again, ground everything as best you can, and use directional, not omni antennas (cheap omni antennas often have grounding issues than can pop the radio card really easy).
See also: wisp-router.com
Transporter_ii
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
-Karl
A rock record: http://www.instarmusic.com/
You forgot get permits and right of way access to even begin doing this. Thats why people use wireless. Not to mention the cost (includes labor x your_time) of doing this would crazy compared to getting two directional wifi antennas and a couple of routers.
When I first moved to my city, DSL and cable were not available. 6 years ago I started a job located about 4 miles away from my home, and they had a T1. Turns out my condo had radio line of sight to work. What I did was set up two Linux boxes on peer to peer wireless using Orinico cards since they had the jack for an external antenna. To those I hooked up the appropriate pigtails and LMR-400 microwave cable to the parabolic grid antennas on the roof of each location. After configuring Linux to handle the routing, bam I was the first guy in my city with broadband. Actually, I'm still running on it though cable and DSL is now available.
Now granted this was the old school way of doing it. The other problem was that I was using 75 feet of LMR-400 cable on each end to bring the signal from the antenna to my card. That's generally not a good idea since long runs of cable attenuate the signal, so it's always best to have your network equipment as close to the antenna as possible. But back then that type of stuff was hella expensive - Just between the grid antennas, the cards, the dongles, and the cables it came out to about $600. You don't even want to know what the network equipment would have cost, which is why I ran it on the cheap using Linux.
But now this stuff practically grows on trees. There are kits around that let you do long distance point-to-point hookups, but I don't know where to get them off the top of my head since I haven't researched it in awhile. You might want to start with Radio Labs to get an idea of the type of equipment that's out there. Bottom line is that if I can get a decent wifi signal from four miles away with a non-optimal configuration, you should be able to do 500m as long as you have line of sight. I think you should be able to get away with it for around $500 or less.
-R
If you have :-
:-)
1) Clear line of sight.
2) A soldering iron (and know how to use it *properly*)
3) Basic metalwork skills.
4) Spare time **LOTS**
http://ronja.twibright.com/
"Ronja is a free technology project for reliable optical data links with a current range of 1.4km and a communication speed of 10Mbps full duplex."
10 Megabit free space optical complete with designs & pcb layouts.
Can't get more DIY than this
Let A = cost of beers for able-bodied friends
B = cost of equipment (free because you already have it? Power tool rental?)
C = cost of submitting a request to the county
D = cost of cables, conduits, etc that gets buried.
If A + B + C + D $10,000 that the cable company is quoting, then it's a good deal. If it gets a permit and is all done to code there's nothing the cable company can sue about... especially since he'd just basically extended their infrastructure at no cost to them.
There's always inviting a cell tower to be built on your property. In such a case the cell companies would wind up buring some kind of infrastructure anyway to support it. When that happens, call again and all of a sudden, wouldn't you know it, you've got cabling all up to practically your doorstep.
More Twoson than Cupertino
Get 2 Linksys WRT54GL rounters, one for each site, and replace an antenna on each with a Hawking [HAO14SDP] directional antenna, and align them to point at each other. Might be best to roof mount the antenna, but aligning them will be the hardest part. You might only need to buy one of the directionals and get an omni for the other antenna at the other site, and rely on the directional to make the connection. I own one of the directionals and it is in my "travel kit", i.e., whenever I go on the road, I have a laptop, a WRT54GL, and the 14dBi directional and do a quick scan around where-ever I am so I can get on the web for a quick fix if the hotel/friend/etc., doesn't have a network connection.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Just the other day I saw two geniuses from Comcast running cable through the lawn of my condo complex. I'm just waiting to see what happens when the landscapers come by to mow the lawn. I hope they don't charge $10k to do that.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
I just emailed him, but
I actually did this before. It was with a pair of WAP11's (current at the time), a 24dBi parabolic, and a 19dBi panel. It was 100% reliable, except for a few circumstances.
After a year, a bamboo tree grew up through the line of site.
One end was in an office, and the WAP11 would overheat because the A/C was turned off on the weekends, and the cleaning crew would shut off the fan blowing on the AP.
In one strong wind, I found I hadn't secured the antenna well enough, and it turned.
They were all easy, obvious problems.
In his case, an AP with a high gain antenna on one end, and a decent antenna on the distant end attached to his wireless device would be fine.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
I think WRT54GL with a 500mW booster may do the trick.
http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.12215
Not sure if this is a gimmiky product or if it will really work.
Just speaking for myself, when I was running DD-WRT it would lock up every few days requiring a reboot. I finally just put a scheduled daily reboot in cron and it worked mostly fine after that, though it did have one or two lockups still over the course of a couple months.
I eventually switched to tomato for better QoS support and tomato has been rock solid.
It also seemed like dd-wrt development wasn't progressing very much, as there hadn't been an update in quite a while. Though I do note now that they finally made v24 an official release just recently, so things may have improved since then.
DD-WRT does have some features that tomato doesn't, though. If I needed any of those features I wouldn't hesitate using DD-WRT again. Though I might try OpenWRT first just because I haven't tried it yet.
Screw digging a ditch.
Lay zero cable:
http://www.lightpointe.com/products/fl_100.cfm