I saw this question posed on on the forums at AnandTech.com and would love to see if it is plausible.
"Ok, here is the deal. I have a freind that lives about 5.7 miles away from me and almost has a line of sight. He would probably have to put an antenae on his house to get a line of sight to mine. At my house, I have no options for high speed internet access, at all, but at his house, he can get cable. I got to thinking, and I came up with an idea. What if I could get ahold of some wireless networking equipment that I could use to network to his house, then he could get cable, we could split the monthly bill, and I would have cable access at my house.
Here is my question: What equipment could I use to do this? I found some stuff on cisco’s site, but it costs about $8000. The speed does not have to be supper fast, but I would like to have something at least the speed of ISDN.
I want to know what other people have to say abhout this, so shoot. "
Is this plausible. Is there any technology out there that uses public spectrum over a 6 mile distance ?
last time i looked, cisco didn’t sell 802.11 wireless cards for $4K each . . .
2 x 802.11 cards + antenna should be able to do it. take good care in getting an appropriate antenna with suitable gain.
the cisco website has a spreadsheet that allows you to calculate the required gain.
if you don’t want 2 x PC’s with 802.11 cards in it, then 2 x wireless access-points or 2 x wireless bridges would work.
still nowhere near $8K . . .
cheers,
lincoln.
NB. line-of-sight is required.
While we’re on the subject. Anyone willing to post their experiences with these products or competitors over distances that we see here.
I saw this question posed on on the forums at AnandTech.com and would
love to see if it is plausible.
Oh, quite.
Here is my question: What equipment could I use to do this? I found
some stuff on cisco's site, but it costs about $8000. The speed does
not have to be supper fast, but I would like to have something at
least the speed of ISDN.
Cisco BR340's - they're $900/each, and work well in bridge mode. As
someone already stated, make sure you get some good high-gain (and
narrow-beam directional - we use 10 degree yagi) antenna's.
Is this plausible. Is there any technology out there that uses public
spectrum over a 6 mile distance ?
With line of sight, they claim they can go 9+ miles. Of course, weather
does affect it - one of our spans tends to go down when there's just the
right kind of heavy rain.
Theoretic speed is 11Mbit/sec - effective (real) speed is about
6Mbit/sec. (YMMV, that's on a 1/2 mile span)
How secure is this connection? Does 802.11
provide security implicitly?
Thanks.
--- "Dominic J. Eidson" <sauron@the-infinite.org>
wrote:
802.11b has some degree of inherent security.
one can apply WEP (Wireless Equivalency Protocol) to encryption the data, but even that has been shown to be vulnerable (http://www.isaac.cs.berkeley.edu/isaac/wep-faq.html)
there are a few alternatives that can be used to make it more secure:
[1] deploy a setup whereby one has per-user dynamically-changing WEP
keys. details on how one vendor can do this are at:
http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/cc/pd/witc/ao350ap/prodlit/1281_pp.htm
details on how to actually configure it is at:
http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/product/wireless/airo_350/accsspts/ap350scg/ap350ch3.htm#xtocid586920
[2] don't trust the link layer, and encrypt everything you send.
this could be as simplistic as adding MAC-address filters to your
access-points and building a tunnel of some kind (eg. IPsec, or
even as simplistic as SSH port-forwarding).
if one is prone to be paranoia, using both [1] and [2] probably makes sense.
cheers,
lincoln.
Dave Hughes did a study of wireless options for rural applications, funded
by NSF I believe. Some fairly current results, including vendors lists and
such, are at http://wireless.oldcolo.com/
Be sure to pay attention to the "Fresnel Zone" references in this
document. While not particularly accurate, it does refer to the problem of
Fresnel Zone intrusion that can cause problems with your path. In other
words, an optical line-of-sight path is not necessarily a good RF
path, so don't bother installing it if you're not going to engineer it.
Chuck
A company I used to work for used Breezecom equipment
(http://www.breezecom.com) for their wireless solutions. The overall
package for each radio was about $500 for the basic equipment, but you can
get the Antenna and radio (per site) for about $1500. The equipment
itself is pretty reliable, but some of it also depends upon who you have
behind the console. The transmission itself is pretty secure (2.4 Ghz if
memory serves me) The equipment from what I have been told was originally
designed for use by the Israeli army, and then was turned public. If you
have line of sight, it shouldn't be that bad, but at 6 miles, you
shouldn't even need an amp for the signal. (keyword:shouldn't)
Good luck.
-Eric