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Originally Posted by Napoleon54
I'm in the process of moving to New Hampshire and it is kinda the sticks so there aren't many options out here. Just found an apartment I like on Thurs night and unfortunately it looks like Comcast is all that's available there. I looked into HughesNet (satellite) and they want a 2 year committment at either $79/month with no setup fee, or $59/month with a $299 setup fee. As crummy as Comcast seems to be (I've found a ton of complaints online), I don't think I'm willing to swallow that much extra cost for satellite. Another thought though... I talked with my future neighbor; he says they have broadband through Comcast and said something about sharing it with me and split the cost. I'll have to look into that. I have no problem ripping off Comcast because it seems like that's what they're trying very hard to do to their customers. Grr. We'll see what happens.
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You can do what I did with my parent's neighbors: DSL is out of the question where they're at, so my parents got their internet access through the local cable company (which sucks, their local network usually bounces once a day and it takes ~30 minutes to reconverge). Most of the other neighbors have DirectTV, so they don't want to spend the $50 for internet access through the cable company.
I set up a high-power Buffalo Gateway Router, put a good 3rd party firmware on it from Sveasoft, and then mounted a large weatherproof 14dB Onmi antenna outside. The cost to me was about $170 with the antenna, lightning arrestor and mounting hardware included. I told the two neighbors chip in on the big antenna cost, buy their own high-power adapters and yagi antennas and point them at my parents' house. I gave them the SSID and the AES-tkip key and it works quite well. They get excellent signals on clear days and decent signals on rainy days (there's some trees in the way, and the distances are around 500ft). We have a gentleman's agreement not to overly abuse it and to help out my parents when I'm not there. It's worked pretty well now for a year and a half. I can even remote into the router via dial-up and troubleshoot any problems, which has happened a few times due to the cable provider's tech support being full of asshats.