I have friend who runs a small dial-up ISP here in a small town. We are wondering how we can plug into this wirelessly from home and how to provide this to customers? I know Tony has a wireless coneection coming into his home (for which he is also a repeater) and was wondering if he could shed some light on the topic.

Basically what we would like to do is to plug a box into a port on the hub, give it an IP address and use it as a NAT server (limited supply of IPs). Somehow have this box hooked up to an antenna on the roof and offer to sell a wireless card (or whatever) with antenna to give people so they can have higher speed access (which we would have to cap as we are hooked up to the net by a large 2 way satellite system, gotta love living in the middle of nowhere!) Any ideas on hardware that is available to do this? Costs involved?? Does a particular hardware setup allow for repeater stations? The general layout of our community is about 10kms long and .5 of a km wide. Pretty straight through and along the beach on one side.

Thanks for any light that you can shed on this situation!

There are several options out there. The one tony has is using 802.11(i think). The ISP has a directional antenna pointed at tony's house and tony has a directional antenna on his roof to recieve the signal. Tony probably has another antenna pointed in the other direction to repeat the signal on down the valley. It sounds like the guy built his own router which does the bridging and routing. The WAP 11 can do this too, but its 150-170 dollars. Im fairly sure the signal wouldnt carry too far without the directional antenna. (Maybe a few houses down) There are other hardware alternatives available for this sort of thing including nokia rooftop (http://www.wbs.nokia.com/solution/index.html) and a cool non line of sight solution from navini networks.

Sean

You have described it correctly, Terminator.

Only one minor correction: My uplink antenna doesn't point directly to the ISP, it points to another repeater, and it's that repeater which points back to the ISP. He's got half a dozen of these little 802.11b repeater systems dotting the countryside around here. It's a nifty little system for those of us in Cow Country who can't get DSL or cable-modem.

Yes, he did build his own routers. They are little motherboard/CPU/Flash dealies running an embedded version of Debian which he has customized heavily (sound familiar?). The reason he did so was so that he can have complete control over them and customize them for various things. For example, he can lock down a router so that only certain MAC addresses can connect to it. This helps with security and prevents anyone from being a freeloader on the signal. He can also throttle the bandwidth of any given client MAC address so that he can sell different amounts of bandwidth for different prices. While he's at it, these routers can do NAT and firewall stuff, eliminating the need for a dedicated router/firewall at the client end. My home-office LAN is literally plugged straight into his custom wireless router, and I get my DHCP addresses from it.

As far as the wireless transceivers, this is what surprised me the most. They are just little Lucent and Orinoco PCMCIA cards. These are the exact same cards you can get for your laptop. The only trick is that these cards have an extra jack for an external antenna. That jack is what plug into the roof antenna (via a pigtail adapter conneced to a MASSIVE low-loss cable running to the antenna).

I know essentially nothing about the antennas. I don't know where he gets them or who makes them. There are two kinds of antennas: 1) the directional ones which point back upstream to a relay or to the ISP. These small mesh antennas, smaller than a DirecTV Satellite antenna. 2) Omnidirectional antennas which are meant to be relay stations, sending their signal in all directions. These look like a short piece of PVC tubing.

I don't know whether or not this sort of thing can be done with off-the shelf wireless routers or not. I guess that it could be done, but it might not be as secure as Scott's custom system.

One thing I do know is that grounding is a major issue for these systems. If you don't ground the antennas properly, it will build up static electricity and fry your router.

The only trick is that these cards have an extra jack for an external antenna.

My normal, everyday Lucent/WaveLAN/Orinoco/Agere 802.11b PCMCIA cards have the jack built in. There's just a little plastic plug sitting over the top of it. The same company that makes the cards also makes the external antennae, as well. Nothing special is needed.

Prepare to be assimilated by Xenu:

Dayton has built Boingo the same way he built EarthLink, said Tim Bajarin, a wireless analyst with Creative Strategies, a high-tech consulting firm in San Jose, Calif. Instead of actually building his own network, he either bought or partnered with enough smaller carriers to offer EarthLink service on a national scale.

I think the wireless technology being described in that article is a different one from the 802.11b stuff I'm hooked up to. It says the radios have a 300-foot range in that article. My nearest uplink antenna is over five miles away.

Xenu comment was cute, though.

Then what's all this lame "300 feet" and "1000 feet" talk? With the proper antennas, it works for miles.

I'm assuming that they're talking about end-user omnidirectional usage, like what you might find at an airport or hotel (or my house). Who knows whether they're smart enough to actually read this. But maybe that would be suppressive or out-ethics, or something.