Wireless Network between 2 houses

davkav

Right basically im lookin for a bit of help wiring my house to friends so we can play LAN games and eventually ill get broadband and we'll share the connection, anyone any ideas what the best hardware would be to get and how i would setup an ariel on the roof.
both houses are in line of sight and about 200m apart

Webmonkey

200m apart, Well you shouldn't even require to put anything on the roof for that. Most bridges/aps work about 300 metres indoors. You might be lucky and get a signal from your desk, but its not a problem setting something up outdoors. Equipment is more expensive alright

Mr. Presentable

Hmmm, Your 802.11g gives a range limit of about 300m, at 200 you might be suffering declination. However, put a wireless router in the attic and try it. Other things like depth of walls etc will come into play. It is a weak radio signal, so try to minimise obstruction and/or interference.

Peats will sell you an 802.11g for about 119.00 and a pair of wireless nics for about 69.00 each. However, if you both have broadband it might work better if one of you sets his PC as a non-dedicated server...... and the other logs in .

Dingatron

I'd try and get a signal check done first. Line of sight is good but Wifi does not like brick walls. I was doing something simular for two mates who were about 5 meters apart side by side. Signal was crap and had to put the router in the roof to get the best signal. It was a 802.11b setup though. You may do better with 802.11g?

Webmonkey

When you get broadband also you'll get a router. Plug it into a switch and plug an AP into that. Then you got dedicated link to router rather than going through PC.
If you have a window facing a window in his house then you shouldn't have a problem. Glass isn't that bad for dropping signals afaik

machalla

I'm doing something similar at the moment but its a bit more awkward due to the back of our house faces onto the side of my friends house. We're having to put up a small antennae at the back of ours and the side of his. These are hooked into Buffalo wireless bridges (WLAR-G54C) at either end. The two bridges communicate between each other and then you can connect up via wireless card into the bridges as they are also access points).

I got the antennae from these guys and also some advice on what to do. Might be worth mailing them. You might be able to do something similar without the antennae if you have a good line of sight.
http://www.wi-pipe.net/

Mind you I have one problem which is that I wanted to put a spare wireless access point (Netgear with a firewall) onto my friends BB connection and then hook that over to the wireless bridges. It doesn't seem to be possible unfortunately so I may have to bridge the entire way over to the internet connection and run a firewall at our end and run one at our friends side to cover his machines also. One firewall where the BB comes into the house would of course be better.

Any suggestions would be welcome (pardon me for trying to take over this thread).

Webmonkey

Instead of having two bridges, why don't you have an Access Point and a bridge.
Hook the BB router to a switch and plug the Access Point into that. Hook the Antenna up to the Access point and do the same setup you had with the bridge, but instead with the Access Point. Then your bridge will connect to the access point, allowing you go log into His Lan, and you'll be able to go out the gateway of the BB connection as long as they are all on the same IP range. All independent aswell, no PC has to be on.

Correct me if i'm wrong here

bridigo

Right basically im lookin for a bit of help wiring my house to friends so we can play LAN games and eventually ill get broadband and we'll share the connection, anyone any ideas what the best hardware would be to get and how i would setup an ariel on the roof.

Just get 2 wireless bridges (eg. Netgear ME101), plug them directly into your PC/PS2/XBOX. When you get broadband place the router between your bridge and PC/PS2/XBOX. It would be ideal if you could place the bridges at windows creating wireless LOS between the two houses.

machalla

Cheers for the advice.

One problem is that the netgear wireless router I have doesn't seem to have anyway of connecting an external antennae to it. The Buffalo wireless bridges (which are also access points btw) do allow for connection of an external antennae. They are hooked up via WDS (Wireless Distribution System) which doesn't seem to be compatible between manufacturers.

The other falling down point is that each ap/bridge needs its own SSID and I'm not sure they will see each other due to the different SSID's. I did a brief test with the buffalo bridge trying to connect it to the Netgear wireless router over WDS by assigning the netgears MAC address to the Buffalo but it didn't seem to be able to connect to the netgear (or at least ping even though I had definitely turned off the firewall in the neatgear and it was coming from an internal address anyway).

I have a solution which I will probably implement which involves two bridges in my friends house. One is where the antennae comes into the house. This will connect to another wireless bridge at the other side of the room (where the BB is). This second bridge will be hooked in (via ethernet) to the Netgear wireless router (which is what my friend will be connecting to as well). It means 3 wireless AP's in the my friends place though so I hope I don't get interference between access points. Its a long-winded solution but it should work I think. Since I already have all the equipment its just a matter of implementing it all now.

The things I do for BB access...