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A DIYer's Quick Guide To Cheap Wireless Extension
An anonymous reader writes "This piece is described in one of the comments on it as 'a little piece of genius'... and I have to agree! Although Peter Cochrane seems a bit of a crack pot, the ways that he comes up with to get connected when he's out of range in the sticks are pure genius and he makes them appear really simple! Think old satellite dishes, USB dongles and plastic bags and you'd be on the right tracks to upping wi-fi signal by 4 bars." A perfect excuse to link to one of my favorite sites, if you want more details and photos on similar jury-rigged long-distance connections. However, your meterage may vary — I've found USB Wi-Fi devices to be pretty fickle under Linux, with some distros working way better than others.
Jury-rigged wifi extenders typically aren't the most reliable things in the world. They also tend to be unidirectional, though omni-direction is possible, you don't get as much gain. You also need to power them, as well as connect them back to the Internet at some point. In the end it all costs money, and someone needs to pay for it.
everybody knows that old satellite dishes and Asian parabolic cookware can be used to boost wifi signals.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
I get nervous when folks start talking about "free" services. Seems that more often than not, "free" actually means that I end up paying for power, bandwidth, and the army of bureaucrats that makes sure those bills get paid on time, and that their uncle's brother's company wins next year's bid.
So, please, count me out. I'll rig my own parabolic signal booster if and when I feel like it.
cogito ergo dubito
I'm too lazy to search for how many times the satellite dish wifi setup has been posted on slashdot, but suffice to say I had one on my roof 5 years ago after getting the idea from a web page that was itself a couple of years old. (even the actual useful link added on by the editor is from 2004)
It's not even a good writeup of the concept. Here's a summary of the "Genius":
-Stick it on the end of the arm.
-Electronics don't like water.
-The sun is hot.
There's nothing genius about this. It's a rehash of something people have done for years, sans details.
It would be much more helpful to protect people from litigation when they open up their wireless networks to strangers. The only thing preventing me from providing free wifi is the tremendous risk of being sued and eventually having to pay for someone else's crimes.
If you've been wardriving lately, you know that we don't need more access points, we need existing access points to be opened.
It could be both. Here it's not particularly "jerry-rigged", as the focus with that phrase is on the quality of the construction, instead of the make-shift nature of it.
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
I have absolutely no problem with that. Also, if you don't have the know-how to secure your network while allowing strangers to use the internet connection, don't open it.
But there are people who want to provide free wireless internet and know how to do it safely. As long as these people have to risk their livelihood providing a free service, it's not going to happen.
It's nice in sentiment. In reality though, it doesn't work. See, ISPs do need to be profitable to stay in business. The way they do that is by making money on the bandwidth they sell. At the price bandwidth goes for these days, they really cannot stay profitable if every single person were to use every mbit of their bandwidth all the time. People who torrent a lot or keep their bandwidth use maxed otherwise generally cost the ISP more than the monthly payment. It's those other low-use customers who simply don't want to wait on dialup for eBay or Yahoo to load that make them money. If every user were allowed to open their wireless and allow everyone to use their connection for free instead of paying for it, ISPs would have no choice but to raise prices to stay afloat. Personally, I'm happy with the current situation where those low-use customers pay for some of my bandwidth.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
If the RIAA is able to successfully sue/prosecute people based off of IP logs, you can be damn sure the CP police can. At least when you're in control of the router, you may be able to trawl through logs and find the MAC associated with the illegal download and hunt down the right person, but don't count on it.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
"...under US law I will go to jail if someone uses my open WiFi to download childporn or some such.
No, you won't go to jail, but you might get investigated and have some equipment confiscated, which is still enough reason for most people not to do it.
Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others. -Groucho Marx