Anyway, after my last post about the legality of sharing broadband connections, I've decided I'd like to try sharing a T1 from Speakeasy with several neighbors. First, though, I have to get enough neighbors on board to make it cost effective. To reach them all, I'm guessing, I'll need to send one heck of a signal. What kinds of antennas or signal boosters should I be looking at? I live in a pretty tightly controlled covenant housing area, so I won't be able to mount an antenna that's too noticeable. What kind of range can I reasonably expect? Will I be able to reach 20 houses down the street? 30?
That depends on what is between the transmitter and receiver absorbing the signal. If you can get a clear path you are going to go a lot farther than if you have to run your signal through 100 layers of drywall. Give up if they have aluminum siding.
The roof is the best place for the antenna. You can easily disguise the antennas as vent pipes by placing them inside PVC pipe. You can mount sectorized antennas on your chimney and use multiple AP transmitters. A Soekris board will support two PCMCIA cards and a mini-PCI giving you three transmitters in one AP. Feed three 120-degree sectorized antennas to get much better performance.
There is no good answer so your best bet is to borrow an AP, set it up at your house or at the house most central to the area you want to cover, and then visit your neighbor's houses to test signal strength and link reliability. Experiment with antenna type and placement at the AP.
Oh, and welcome to all the headaches of being a WISP without any of the financial rewards. (Not that there are many financial rewards for being a WISP.)
Also, how many can I expect to share T1 service with before there's noticeable degradation in the connection?
The answer to this one is also "it depends". Back in the good ol' days I used to calculate this based on the statistical probability that each user is going to use an average of about 50 Kbps. This is based on mostly browsing, some email, an occasional download, etc. For most home users this works out pretty well. Based on this you can get about 30 concurrent users on a 1.5Mbps T1 line.
But someone will want to trade MP3s and your calculation will go to hell. In that case you probably want to bandwidth limit each of your users. This will make the rest unhappy because they won't be able to burst up to 1.5Mbps. It is better if you can bandwidth limit some applications and not others. Start boning up on the IP protocol stack so you can understand the issues and configure your router accordingly.
-- Brian Lloyd 6501 Red Hook Plaza [EMAIL PROTECTED] Suite 201 http://www.lloyd.com St. Thomas, VI 00802 +1.340.998.9447 (voice) +1.360.838.9669 (fax)
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