Will this work?

O

ohgod

Gawd
Joined
Mar 4, 2004
Messages
620
Okay first off, where I live I can only get Direcway ( Sattelite Internet ) which makes online gaming impossible. Now my neighbor up the road ( less than a mile ) has cable. I thought of a possible way of getting his internet to me and I came up with the idea of connecting his modem to a wireless router and installing a wireless network card in my computer. Id say the distance between my house and his is about 1000-2000 feet. 1. will I get a good connection that far away? , if not would I have to use signal extenders?, 2. How will the internet conncection be, would it give me a faster, lower latency connection than the D-Way?
Thanks for the help guys, im just trying to throw ideas around in my constant struggle for high speed internet.
 
There's a possibility you could get connected, and it is very likely that your latency will be considerably lower than what you've been experiencing with DirectWay.

The big problem is that most standard SOHO wireless routers don't have much for directional antennas. You'd have to either

1. Build your own
2. Buy one

If you're willing to spend some money, then you'd be better off with option #2. If your friend is open to the idea, you could mount an antenna pointing towards your house and mount an antenna on your house pointed towards his.

Some things to consider:
- Do you have (radio) line of sight to his house
- Are there any hills or trees between your two locations
- Do you have the experience necessary to properly mount an antenna without destroying his/your house
- What price are you willing to pay, which affects...
- What equipment will you purchase
- Use LMR-400 cable for the run to your antenna, and be sure to weatherproof your connections

Personally I'd look for an Access Point that is capable of at least 300 mA of output, and purchase a WiFi NIC that does at least 300 mA of output. Check here for a list of cards and their outputs. The more mA the better, especially if you're going to be shooting radio through trees.

Also, if there's a pretty good size ridge between your house and his it probably isn't worth trying. 802.11 uses radio signals, and weak ones at that. If you aren't familiar with radio line of sight do a google for "fresnel zone" and start reading.

That's about it... outside of thinking about how you want the connectivity coming into your house. For my situation (I'm running wireless a little over a mile to my house) I've got an old laptop (PII-350) running BSD that NATs my connection from the AP.
 
Also, I know the Linksys routers have 3rd party firmware that lets you up the power rating. I'm pretty sure that voids your warranty though. If you're willing to scrap the warranty you might look into that. I'm also not sure if the FCC approves, so you might want to look into that too. Just giving you another idea to look into.
 
Whoa, thanks for the help! Yeah there is a hill in between the two houses so they arent line of sight. So I dont think I could use an antenna. Could I maybe use wireless signal extenders?
Also does anyone have an idea of what kind of latencys would I be getting? I came up with this idea so I could do everything I cant do with Direcway, like playing games , downloading large files etc...
 
What if you put a repeater halfway there. Figure out the optimal use of the fresnal effect, then mount it there.
 
to answer the question on latency....

My pings to my Access Point (AP) generally run in the 8-15ms range, then add the latency across the WAN to whatever server I'm gaming on, and I will typically see anywhere between 30ms and 80ms pings.

The problems with wireless will pop up when your radios aren't able to get packets through to each other cleanly. There can be all sorts of interference, from 2.4GHz cordless phones to microwaves, to standing water on tree leaves (rain doesn't really affect 2.4GHz, but standing water does). When the radios realize a packet was missed, they retransmit it. This can cause all sorts of delays, upping your pings into the 50-60 range to your AP, and sometimes as high as 400-500. The best way to overcome this is to have enough power from your WiFi NIC directed through a high gain antenna, so when interference comes in-band, your signal will be strong enough to punch through it.
 
The best way to overcome this is to have enough power from your WiFi NIC directed through a high gain antenna, so when interference comes in-band, your signal will be strong enough to punch through it.
Click to expand...

in which case, if you have too much power and your neighbors have interference with their electronic equipment, you'll be getting a call from the FCC. it takes a lot of power to move 2.4 ghz signals any significant distance. make sure there's penty of power, but don't go overboard.

edit: typed "not of power" instead of "lot of power"
 
Thanks for all the info, im going to try and go for this. Thanks for all the help guys!
 
DarkOne_BW said:
Personally I'd look for an Access Point that is capable of at least 300 mA of output, and purchase a WiFi NIC that does at least 300 mA of output. Check here for a list of cards and their outputs. The more mA the better, especially if you're going to be shooting radio through trees.
Click to expand...

Any suggestions for a 300ma Bridge? Im currently using a 200ma Senao, but im getting some weird connection issues. It doesnt help that i have a few trees in the way but for some reason every night the connection drops or works at a crawl. My ISP has been trying to figure out what is going on but they have no Idea, they tried to put stronger equipment in and that didnt help. Im looking for any thing that i can do on my end to try and fix this situation.
 
If the wireless solution becomes to difficult, would it be possible to run a Cat 5 cable to my house? Is there a problem with signal degredation?
 
the old specs for cat5 say you can run a cable 100 meters (~300 feet) before attenuation becomes a big problem.

i read in another thread that the number has been upped to 185 meters, but all of my books say 100, so i'd stick with that unless you're certain.

the attenuation will become a problem, yes. you'll need a device to rebuild the signal. an old hub, a cheap switch, something of that nature will do.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top