Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Kevster
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.
|
Kevster, that is brilliant! My apartment is above a garage and the neighbor I was talking to rents the house, so the signal would only have to go maybe 50' across the driveway. Depending on where his router and my computer are placed in our respective residences, is it possible I might be able to get his wifi signal directly? If I can't see his wifi, what's the minimum kinda setup (antennas) I'd need to beam it over? We could probably even string a cat5 cable across the gap but that'd be kinda ghetto. (I'm not above going ghetto, but it sounds like there definitely are better ways to do it)
Edit: sorry to all for hijacking the thread, but y'know, this is my
internet connection we're talkin' about... I think most here would see that as a pretty high priority
(not 'cause it's specifically mine, but 'cause internet connectivity is something we as a group generally value quite highly)