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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.
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.
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.
-Karl
A rock record: http://www.instarmusic.com/
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.
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 300 year old cottage? Just asking...
Reeally? If you build a cabin in the woods, the gov't has to come dig you a well? Something tells me you haven't looked into this local legislation as deeply as you think you have.
Where I live, if you don't live in town, you pay the electric company to plant poles to deliver the power. You pay the well digger to dig you a well. And you pay the telephone company to string some line along those electric co. poles. If you don't like the above, you sit in the dark and use an outhouse.
Repetition does not transform a lie into the truth. - FDR
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.