Dubai Stu

My old boss now lives on Roosevelt Way in Point Roberts, Washington. Her across the street neighbors live in Tawwassen, British Columbia. House to house, they are about 80 feet apart.

She pays $120 for crappy 3 meg down internet that comes in by a fiber optics cable and is microwaved around the Peninsula. Across the street she can get 250 mbps down with a terabyte limit for the same money. She is willing to upgrade her neighbor's service in exchange for piggy back rights. Obviously trenching cable across an international border and a public road is a stupid idea.

Any other brilliant ideas?

gfunkdave

A wifi link is about the only cheap-ish choice. Each house gets a high-gain antenna and points it to the other house's antenna. YOur boss connects the antenna to her router and gets an IP address on her neighbors' LAN. There's a somewhat active hobbyist community in the art of nontraditional wifi like this.

lensman

Is your boss sure there isn't an alternative internet service available through a cable tv company or something?

Dubai Stu

She says so. I haven't researched it.

Loren Pechtel

Yup. Get it above the road if feasible so trucks don't interfere. 80 feet doesn't take anything fancy in the antenna department. IIRC around here someone set one up over something around 80 miles (not as a serious connection, a can-we-do-it type of thing.) Of course that involved dishes bigger than the people doing it.

cordelli

Across the street like line of sight? They would probably just need a decent wireless router in the neighbors place and the signal may reach, if not set up a wifi router in repeater mode in her window.

cblaisd

I have had a similar situation and about 400 feet of distance to travel.

Here's how I did it; it worked great:

Source:
Modem --> Router ---> Access Point (set up as repeater parent) --> Cantenna aimed at destination house

Destination:
Identical access point set up as child repeater with a hi-gain antenna attached to propagate the signal in the destination house.

It really worked amazingly well. And it was with old Netgear WG102 access points that can be had cheap (although I don't know if they can do modern security)

ScottC

Do it right - get metal antenna posts on the outside of the house (ground them!!) and use outdoor directional antennas like this:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000B59J8I...BN4J8HA3V415Q&

If she's not satisfied with 3Mbps now, you'll need a very reliable wifi link to get speeds that will satisfy her - use routers with DD-WRT and boost the power. 80 feet isn't a terribly far distance, but WiFi speeds drop quickly as the distance increases. Do a site survey on your phone to find open channels, and if necessary, link using something that won't have much interference (like 802.11a). Don't bother with 802.11n on 5MHz, the range on that is usually quite dismal.

Upstate

I think you are better off just finding the open channels on 802.11b/g . 802.11a is 5.4Ghz and for distance you want a lower frequency as in b/g's 2.4Ghz plus the fact that b/g is faster anyway. And it sounds like they are in a neighborhood so the wifi shouldn't be too crowded anyway.

WWGuy

Check out these links for some interesting ideas:

http://www.diywireless.net/

http://www.gnswireless.com/bridgekits.htm

chx1975

Just get two Dark Knights. http://reviews.cnet.com/routers/asus...5110985-2.html "100 feet for the range test, still with a 450Mbps client, the router managed to maintain a high throughput of about 155Mbps

I also tested the RT-N66U with regular 2x2 (ps) clients and on the 5GHz band and it scored an impressive 110Mbps and 98Mbps for close and long distances, respectively."

Also you can crank the power of the router through the roof. Here is someone doing this: http://forums.smallnetbuilder.com/sh...6&postcount=91

HDQDD

10 replies and no-one has mentioned a simple wireless bridge. Simply procure a wireless bridge for the client side and connect your switch and/or access point (or both) on the other side of the bridge. That's a nice simple setup that will work very well.

At 2.4GHz, you'll have a range of well over 100m. 5GHz not so much...the wavelength just doesn't travel as far (especially thru obstructions tree leaves/walls).

Hardware isn't a big issue, and if it is, simply re-flash any general retail device with free firmware from dd-wrt (google it)

pseudoswede

Actually, a few posts above...

I'm thinking the former boss would want something a little more reliable than two inexpensive routers with home-cooked firmware.

lensman

Let's not confuse advanced routing features with the simple need for:
1. Something that works for the specific case of using an access point to bridge two networks. Most consumer router firmware is complete garbage. Even the best ones seem to have the bridging feature as an afterthought. The fringe element who uses DD-WRT is often specifically looking for these fringe features.
2. The ability to set broadcast power above the power allowed by the FCC will generally only be found on non-commercial firmware for obvious reasons.
3. An overpowered radio amplifier is an accident and generally not purposefully designed into consumer routers. You just luck into them and benefit from the fringe element's research.

My concern here is that the boss may not have the technical expertise to get some of the more complicated setups working. For some reason, I've always had to spend hours trying to get this wireless network bridging working.

cordelli

A google map search shows some of the houses have trees on the property. Seriously, if there are trees on both sides of the street I would slingshot a line up in the trees across the street and just pull a network cable. Maybe put some christmas lights on it so if anybody sees it they won't pay much attention to it.

We are talking about a distance of about 27 yards. Almost any solution will work.