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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?
Supplies:
Hoe (one per helper)
500 meters of heavy duty conduit
500 meters of cable (recommend that you lay fiber at the same time)
Solution 1:
1a: Dig a long trench from the cable termination point down the dirt road to your father's house
1b: Dig a long trench from "the closest neighbour with cable internet" down the dirt road to your father's hose
Ensure that the trench is at least 18 inches deep, roughly 8 inches wide
2. Lay 500 meters of heavy duty conduit. Ensure that you are threading your cable through the conduit all the way along. Attempting to thread the cable AFTER the counduit has been completed may prove to be problematic.
3a: Call the cable company to connect the cable to the cable termination point. Begin paying monthly subscription to cable internet provider.
3b: If you've chosen to run the connection to your neighbhour's home, ensure that you don't piss him/her off. They are now your cable internet provider.
4. Profit $$$
Just get a proper directional antenna to replace the one on the router. Do the same for your neighbor and link'em together I got one when I was living back Prague and connected with a 200kb/s link to an access point about 300 meters away (that was the speed of the connection - not the actual link). Actually, it's quite common for people to construct neighborhood networks that way (well at least in CZ)
"WiMax is too complex for a 70-year old man." At what age does WiMax dementia set in?
http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/22/318-wifi-network-bridge-connects-two-locations-up-to-5-miles-ap/
500 meters is about 1,640 feet. I do that to my parents place now. I just got two Linksys routers running dd-wrt and two good outdoor antennas. With dd-wrt I cranked up the radio output a bit and have no problem getting full throughput over about that same distance.
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 live near lax, but my building has really old wiring and i can't get dsl at this location, but i'm a mile from the office and once on the roof i found i had line of sight. I bought two wireless access points from ascendance, I bought the heavy ones cause i wanted to use the high performance radios so i can get 100mbit. (i work for an isp and i was able to just bring it right into my colo. But if you get http://www.ascendance.net/storefront/detail.aspx?ID=788 that should work two, you need two of them. Configuration isn't difficult, you set one as an AP and the other as a client, set your encryption and static /30 ip. and aim them at eachother. All done. On average with the standard radio you can get 20mbits up and down, and its solid enough to put voip calls over. The max range is just under 5 miles, that should cover you.
Hope that helps.
You can buy or build a cantenna. They're illegal. But with a bit of work and patience, they function well. I dunno if a simple can-based setup can handle half a kilometer (and if it can, it's going to need a good solid connection to the house to keep it aligned) but I do know that a cantenna operated at the focal point of a used satellite dish will work fine up into the several kilometer range.
They're really cheap to build. You generally need to find reverse-polarity RF connectors to hook to the card in the computer. Digikey.com, newark.com, and mouser.com all sell reverse-polarity rf connectors. Traditionally people put n-type rf connectors on the antenna but that's a pain: I built mine using a bnc bulkhead connector on the can, and a rp-sma-to-bnc converter connector on my wireless adapter card, and just ran bnc cable from one to the other.
Mine only runs 40 meters through a couple of walls. Hopefully other people will correct this if it's the wrong solution for 500 meters.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Have you seen these? I think they would require LoS for maximum efficiency, but it's worth a peak. You could use two directional high gain antennas and point them at each other if LoS is nearly there... But bear in mind that nothing about their doc requires LoS, just that we all know it works better if there is.
http://www.hawkingtech.com/products/productlist.php?CatID=32&FamID=58&ProdID=133
2^3 * 31 * 647
I suggest learning about antennas.
Wireless access point at each end, directional antennas, wifi goodness ensues.
I've done 1000 meters with simple patch antennas and wrt54g routers running dd-wrt to create a wireless ethernet extension. Only heavy rain will drop the connection.
Otherwise look up the laser types. there are hundreds of websites on how to do this simple and common task.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
There is an article at engadget about this sort of thing. It requires line-of-site, but I'm sure you could manage that.
Link to the Article
Hope this helps.
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/
If you gave a little more info. If you have line of sight then its no problem at all just buy 2 routers that can be flashed to DD-WRT. (I suggest the Asus WL-500G Premium or the Linksys WRT54GL I own both and they both work like a charm just make sure you buy the right connector Asus: rp-SMC/linksys: rp-TNC)
After you figure that out go to http://www.hyperlinktech.com/familylist.aspx?id=146 or where ever you want to get an Antenna.
my guess is your going to want to grab the 24db one seeing as how the 30 jumps quite a bit in price. after that mount them both with line of sight connect everything up and you should be good to go. If you don't have line of sight then its going to depend on whats in the way if its possible at all.
There are companies out there who will do a professional job of installing fixed-wireless from point A to point B.
You may want to pay your neighbor for a utilities easement to either run a cable down his property or install point A for fixed-wireless on his property. Then, pay the cable company as normal for them to connect Point A to their hookup. You will also need to get electrical service. The up-front costs won't be cheap but it will be a lot less than $10K.
If there are several neighbors affected, you may want to form a co-op or contract with a company who will own the easement.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
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
maybe a verizon broadband access card? they sell it in usb format too... 5GB monthly cap is kinda small though so it might not suit your needs.
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"
The guy who serviced my house had what looked like a big pizza cutter on a stick. It buried the cable about two inches deep.
Conduit is neither required nor used for cable and phone in a residential setting. If you break it you patch it. This is simple and low cost.
Maybe a 300 year old cottage? Just asking...
Just run phone quality twisted pair (cat 3) if you have adjacent land or can get permission from any adjacent land owners. Just buy low cost VDSL Ethernet bridges, they can be obtained for less then $200. Also 2000 ft of cat 3 can be obtained for less then $200 (just bridge two 1000ft spools vdsl doesn't care).
Then go aerial, affix the cat 3 to a wire (for support) and put a 10 ft pole every 10 meters or so. Aerial is most likely the easiest to install, maintain, and upgrade. It also allows for the running of coax for a future cable tv install that will require additional amplification to reach your fathers house.
The nice thing about running cat 3 is vdsl has a nice upgrade path to 100 mbps and beyond.
Linksys (I don't know about others) come with a standard antenna port
Careful. Not ALL Linksys have antenna ports. Some do, some don't. I just bought one that doesn't. Not a concern for me, but don't buy one online without looking closely expecting them to have ports.
- ------- There are ten kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary, and those who... Huh?
Ho: "For $20 I'll do anything you want."
Dad: "Here's twenty bucks, lay 500 meters of conduit to my house, b****!"
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
We've done 5 mile links with a pair of *old* wallmount AT&T Wavelan bridges and proper antennas on 915 Mhz. Those units were 400mw.
Such antennas are cheap and small, too. Under $100 in singles at a number of companies with online ordering facilities.
A 24db skeleton-parabola can get you miles of range even without a high-gain antenna on the other end, and is about the size of a UHF TV antenna. (I know one guy who war-scans the business district of San Francisco with one - from his apartment deck in Berkeley. B-) ) With antennas on both ends you should be able to go with the little lozenge types.
To give you an idea of range: My Nevada house is about 5 miles from the cell tower where the local WiSP has its POP, with a directional antenna pointed generally my way. His customers normally use a lozenge antenna with built in AP mounted on an outside wall, and I'll probably do that when I sign up (because my computer room is on the far side of the house). But my picture window faces the tower and my laptop catches the ID beacon just fine sitting in my lap using the builtin antenna.
So for a half-mile putting an AP in each attic and even a low-gain external antenna on the roof or outside wall should do the job just fine.
Want a cheap do-it-yourself high-gain directional antenna? Get a big wok strainer (woks and their strainers are pretty good parabolas), put a USB-stick WiFI adapter on a USB extension cord, and mount it with its backside at the focus of the strainer. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Or you can do it yourself for $318
make sure they know you want to 'lay some pipe'
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.