On Wed, 19 Jan 2005, Russell Nelson wrote:
> Okay, my ISP is dropping all their frame relay lines, including mine. > Cable Internet is not an option because they refuse to run cable TV > down my road. I'm 5.5 miles from the CO, so DSL won't work. > Point-to-point leased line is horrifically expensive. Satellite > Internet is a last option. Have you looked into ISDN or IDSL? They work at a farther distance out than ADSL. > I might even be able to afford fiber, but > that's a research project, not a reality. Reality is that I need to > get from my house either to my ISP or else to some place that has > Cable Internet. Reality is also that I lack line of sight to either. This sounds pretty rough. > So, I'm looking at having to provision a multi-hop network. What is > the current state of the art? Should I buy pairs of WRT54G, > cross-connect their Ethernets, and throw them into plastic buckets on > rooftops, one with an onmi and the other with a directional pointing > at the next hop? What kind of reliability are you demanding, and how much are you willing to pay for it? What rooftop / tower access do you think you can get? Do you think you might want to share the connection and its costs with others? How much bandwidth do you need and how much do you want? I know potsdam is pretty far north so weather durability is an issue. Unless you have good redundancy built into the network, you should use industrial-grade parts. How much wireless hacking do you want to get involved with, or do you want an off-the-shelf system? Personally, I really like mesh type networks. If you can get a couple of other people involved, this could work well. The MIT Roofnet software is probably the best mesh out there, http://pdos.lcs.mit.edu/roofnet . There's porting to the Netgeat WGT634U going on, so this $80 router, plus maybe $30 for a weatherproof enclosure, plus $50 for an 8dBi antenna, $30 for mounting & cable, $10 for cat5 & power cable, brings the cost to $200 per node. You can build it cheaper if you don't have to mount it on a roof but can instead use an old PC and save money. I've used Pentium 90s with 32mb of ram and a 540mb drive, with an ISA pcmcia bus adapter, a senao 200mw card, and one of the guerrilla.net antennas for less than $80. Of course, doing it the 'right' way would be to spend the extra money on proven boards such as the Soekris. But by the time you're done going that way, it's probably $400. But if you have less time than money and reliability is critial, this may be the best way to go. -Bob p.s. Russ thanks for all you've done for the Linux community over the years. _______________________________________________ BAWUG's general wireless chat mailing list [unsubscribe] http://lists.bawug.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless
