Neighborhood WiFi?

I would suggest since you have line of site and you are not that far to use a router "Linksys Vers4 router, with dd-wrt"on his end and a19 db panel antenna with a connector to router not cable. Then use the same on your end but two of the configurations. One set to client the other set to access. Cat5 them together. This way he can put one Sid out you can put another. Any where in-between week use a Signal Seeker. The Signal Seekers will reach that distance alone. But you will have more control over the above of your network. And they can be stand alone units no computers to contend with. The Signal Seekers would be easy for your customers to hook up. They just plug in to USB. They could use one then set that computer to share the connection to there wireless network.

Ed

Ed Bailen hath wroth:

It may be $500/month but there's also a setup charge, and some equipment charges for the CSU/DSU. Calculate your costs carefully.

Line of sight is a requirement at 2.4Ghz. However, 900MHz will go through trees fairly well. However, 3000ft is not so far that wire is still an option. For example, Cisco has their LRE (long reach ethernet) that will go about 5000ft ft to 15Mbits/sec. You can also run just one phone pair and use a pair of SDSL modems to do

768/768Kbits/sec (or faster). Of course there's fiber, but that's expensive. Consider wire if possible.

The shacks probably belong to the techy type engineers. The villas to the managers. Sigh.

I think you're being a bit optimistic on the costs. That may be the shared cost of the T1, but does not cover answering the phone in the middle of night, dealing with abuse issues, storm maintenance, interference mitigation, antenna installations, etc. If you have lots of spare time and are on good terms with the neighbors, that might work. However, if this is a business proposition and you're in a position to guarantee the service, you may find the benifits do not compensate for the hassles. When something goes wrong, you'll get 8 phone calls.

We have a neighborhood LAN with a mixture of wireless, wire, fiber, and coax. I lost count of how many houses are on the system. About

12 machines currently. Mostly kids. I find that I have to devote at least one full day per month fixing things and dealing with user issues. Would you do that for $50/month?

Think of it this way... You're playing ISP (internet service provider). You need to do everything that a wire line ISP does in addition to dealing with the complexities and mysteries of wireless. Got a machine you can dedicate to monitoring the system?

Never mind the techies. Worry about the kids. At this time about 1/3 of the traffic on the internet is BitTorrent. It will hog every byte of available bandwidth. One clueless BitTorrent user will cause the system to grind to a halt. Users can control their bandwidth use, but most don't. That means you have to go into the QoS or bandwidth management business for them in order to keep the system alive. Are you ready to play bandwidth policeman?

It's a common arrangement. The backhaul should be on a different channel or band as the distribution network. You'll need at least

1.5Mbits/sec in both directions, which is easy enough to obtain with almost any wireless link. If you're really in the middle of nowhere, interference should not be an issue, but methinks a site survey with a spectrum analyzer might be a useful precaution.

Yeah, I can tell you're a ham. That will work depending on distance and interference. Plan on spending some time matching the feed horn to the dish or you'll get different gains in xmit and receive. If you have better things to do, I suggest a commercial dish and a radio that runs PoE near the antenna to eliminate coax losses. If you do plan to run coax, then use LMR-400 with N connectors. No PL-259's or BNC's.

No. The vertical radiation angle necessary to be useful is too narrow with high gain omnis. An omni also picks up crud from all directions. Instead, I suggest sector antennas pointed in the general direction of your customers. Each antenna is easily tilted downwards. You can start with an omni for testing, but plan on switching to sector antennas fairly quickly.

If you calculate the gain (in dBi) per dollar spent, the yagi is a loser. I suggest either a dish or a panel (patch) antenna.

you wanna do the ham thing, building a biquad is quite easy and gets decent gain. More later.... I'm late for a disappointment.

Continuing onward...

Chuckles. How many different types of bridges would you guess there are? See my list at: |

Anyway, you have a choice of doing it several ways. Short version (because I'm busy).

1. Your ISP delivers one routeable IP for every user. Each user supplies their own firwall for NAT. I think (not sure) that a simple access point and client radio will work because it only needs to pass one MAC address. However, methinks a transparent bridge or "wireless bridge" will be better in case the topology changes.
2. Your ISP delivers one IP address. The NAT router is installed at the nephew end. The wireless backhaul is a transparent bridge or "wireless bridge" in order to pass multiple MAC addresses. Each user has an additional NAT firewall for their multiple machines.
3. Your ISP delivers two IP addresses. The nephew end gets one, and everyone else has to do NAT to share the other IP address. The nephew end has a router as does the tower end. The wireless link needs to only pass one IP address and can therefore live with just about anything. Each user will have an additional router
4. Some variation in between including mapping routeable IP addresses to NAT IP's in a Cisco router.

So, what's your prefered topology and we'll figure out what type of backhaul you need? I recommend number 1.

Yes, something like that. The safest is a transparent bridge, which will pass multiple MAC addresses and will work with just about any configuration. Something like a Linksys WAP54G.

Again, it's topology. The backhaul will probably be two identical wireless bridge radios (i.e. WAP54G). The ethernet connection from your WAP54G would go to some kind of common access point (or router) depending on your IP address layout and topology. Each user would have some kind of common client adapter to connect. They will probably also have an NAT router to deal with multiple computers.

300ft is the maximum CAT5 run for real PoE (power over ethernet). That will work. Visualize climbing the tower in the rain and snow in order to placate one your complaining customers.

Sorta. Again it depends on your IP address layout. If you can deliver NAT'ed IP address to each client, then a wireless client bridge radio and a simple ethernet switch will take care of their system. Of course that doesn't protect them from attack from the network, so a single MAC wireless bridge and a router would probably be more useful. Something like a WAP54G in client mode, with any NAT ethernet router behind it.

If it hits, you lose. Unless you buy hardware that's specifically designed for outdoor use, lightning is highly likely to destroy the devices. Carry lots of spares.

Thanks, Jeff, for both of your informative replies.

I'm pretty lukewarm on this idea for many of the reasons you have mentioned (customer support, equipment spares, etc.) and I hadn't thought of the possible bandwidth hog, but I didn't want to rain on nephew's parade without at least looking into it. I'm retired and nephew isn't, so you can guess who would be doing most of the customer handholding.

I'll pass your info on to nephew, & maybe I can talk him into going with a satellite connection if he wants more bandwidth that the ISDN connections we get out here.

Regards, Ed

I learned this the hard way. I have a T1 with community wireless network. I tell each and every client "I don't support file sharing. If you're going to do file-sharing, please sign up for some other service." Every now and then one of them figures I won't notice if they suck up every single damn bit of the bandwidth for days at a time. I've kicked two customers completely off the network and reformed three or four others. Hard to compete with DSL when they don't give a damn if you suck up every bit of 3Mbs for weeks on end.

Jeff

Found this on DD-WRT. Couldn't you do this and set the limits and share across the network so no one person could hog it.

you can share your available bandwidth evenly among you and your brother using the htb queueing discipline in tc..

I'll explain by example..

tc qdisc del dev eth1 root

tc qdisc add dev eth1 root handle 1: htb default 10 tc class add dev eth1 parent 1: classid 1:1 htb rate 128kbit ceil 128kbit

tc class add dev eth1 parent 1:1 classid 1:10 htb rate 1kbit ceil 1kbit tc class add dev eth1 parent 1:1 classid 1:20 htb rate 63kbit ceil 128kbit tc class add dev eth1 parent 1:1 classid 1:30 htb rate 64kbit ceil 128kbit

tc qdisc add dev eth1 parent 1:10 handle 10: sfq tc qdisc add dev eth1 parent 1:20 handle 20: sfq tc qdisc add dev eth1 parent 1:30 handle 30: sfq

iptables -F

iptables -A POSTROUTING -t mangle -o br0 -d 192.168.1.100 -j CLASSIFY --set-class 1:20 iptables -A POSTROUTING -t mangle -o br0 -d 192.168.1.101 -j CLASSIFY --set-class 1:30

this is meant for at connection with a downstream limit equal to 128kbit (kbps).

If your ip is .100 and your brothers is .101 the downstream bandwidth will be shared evenly among you. and as a bonus if you're not using any of your bandwidth your brother will be able to "borrow" from you

"Ed" hath wroth:

Probably, but there are other things that BitTorrent will break. Besides eating bandwidth, it eats buffers. Read through this thread first:

the bandwidth is a big help, but even so, it's still possible for BitTorrent to monopolize a broadband connection. If it opens hundreds of the streams and the router can't handle them all, it will crash the router.

There's quite a bit here on how bandwidth managers work but nothing specific to BitTorrent.

just block ports 6881 and 6981 and be done with it.

Incidentally, I only partly understand how QoS works and borrowed most of my configurations from examples. I are not an expert.

QoS on a WRT54G(s) running DD-WRT v23

Why not simply use a router that enforces QoS (Quality of Service)?

[POSTED TO alt.internet.wireless - REPLY ON USENET PLEASE]

True, but I've not seen that to be a problem with decent routers.

Use a better router, ideally one that can enforce comprehensive QoS.

That *won't* necessarily stop Bittorrent -- it's easy to use different ports.