Sharing BB

Webmonkey

FuzzyLogic,
You should hold up with this Wifi and don't stop, it's exciting and a learning experience. How boring would it be if all of you just got your own adsl connections, pretty much. You are also making use of your current equipment also. At least with WiFI you learn a lot about networking. In my opinion that's whats most important, not that you get broadband in the end of the day.

Good luck with it and if you need any help i'll try do my best to help you.

Webmonkey.

Peanut

Blaster99 wrote:

In reality it's of course a lot worse than you make out. Eircom will deliver 4Mbps on that link, or 2Mbps on a normal ADSL sub. Sharing that 4Mbps among 10 users and you'll be lucky if most users see 1Mbps. If somebody uploads anything the connection is dead for everyone. You'll have to ban and police P2P apps etc, usually the sort of stuff people get an uncapped connection for.

Nah it's not usually that bad, even with p2p, as long as it's not excessive.
A 48:1 contention ratio does not mean that you might have speeds of 2Mbit/48 sometimes, it's not implemented as simply as that.

Also I don't think Eircom really care what you are doing with it unless you are going way above the cap on a capped package. They've got bigger things to worry about.

By the way, 802.11g is pretty sucky for any sort of long distance connections, e.g. over 1 or 2 km maybe. .11b is usually better, and you can get a lot better .11b customer-premises equipment.

Webmonkey

Peanut wrote:

By the way, 802.11g is pretty sucky for any sort of long distance connections, e.g. over 1 or 2 km maybe. .11b is usually better, and you can get a lot better .11b customer-premises equipment.

You're right there. 11g is more of a bandwidth carrier but it should still do the trick.

Gone West

Webmonkey wrote:

FuzzyLogic,
You should hold up with this Wifi and don't stop, it's exciting and a learning experience. How boring would it be if all of you just got your own adsl connections, pretty much. You are also making use of your current equipment also. At least with WiFI you learn a lot about networking. In my opinion that's whats most important, not that you get broadband in the end of the day.

Good luck with it and if you need any help i'll try do my best to help you.

Webmonkey.

Thats exactly my mentaility. I'm going to go ahead with this. Hopefully the monopoly will have unbundled our exchange by next week, and I can go live.
I'll start up a new thread in a few weeks with my (obligatory) questions and problems that I've encountered. Thanks for the advice and suggestions, folks. I'll keep you posted on what goes wrong.

neon_glows

2 Questions, setting this up sounds so interesting i may do it myself, id have different intentions though to fuzzylogic, not to make money but to get myself a better uncapped internet connection and to enjoy the learing experience.

I live in a small town and i know loads of ppl who havent broadband as its to expensive for them, if i could get a 4meg connection uncapped i would share it with maybe 7 households who would be lite users (so i can go download mad). Id charge them maybe 20euro each, thats 140 euro a month which is the cost of the connection. (Halk price of eircom).

Now me two Questions are,

a) the equipment needed to set up a wireless internet network between 7 households within 1 km of each other how much would this cost to buy the hardware.

b) Does anyone know of any software that i can use to limit everyone to a certain connection. (See i could give myself a 1meg connection and share the other 3meg between 7 houses which works out at worst 438kbs connection if we were all online at same time and give myself an upload of 80kbs and share the other 174kbs between 7 house which would be 24kbs upload for them if we were all online at anyone time)

Gone West

Neon_glows: Hey read my posts! I said specifically that I would only only charge to cover the cost of the actual broadband. I wouldn't have any notion of making money off this. So my plan is pretty much the exact same as yours.

Your questions, though are very good. I'm not sure is what software there is to limit the line speed to certain computers. I'm sure that If I used an old linux or win box as a firewall, I could limit certain IP's to certain speeds. But I would prefer to limit the speeds through the actual AP/Router's web interface. Anybody know if that's possible
?

Now: question 2: You will need a very decent AP (a wifi hub) probably 120 for a good one. Then you will need an omnidirectional antanea (about 30 yoyos). Antenae choice depends to whether the other people are spread around you, or are you in the center of everybody. You will want to start small, at first just use the network for your own personal use. Then add 1 other user every few days/week and see how it goes from there.

I do agree that this will be a great learning experience (even if everything goes belly-up). Especially as this is the kind of area where I want to work when I finish my education.

Blaster99

The normal way to do this is to put a Proxim Orinoco PCMCIA card in a Linux box and connect the Orinoco to an omni. The thing that perhaps most people don't realise is that the radio in most wireless equipment is poor, but there a few products out there that for some reason have good radios. The Proxim Orinoco is one. You need one of the older versions of it, though, they're not all good. I can't remember the spec off hand. I'm sure there are plenty articles about it online.

Once you're running Linux you can do all sorts of shaping as well, even though that sometimes doesn't work out quite as well as one would wish.

The same thing pretty much applies to the client end. They need a decent radio and an aerial, so they can't use any ol' AP. The Linksys WET11 used to be a good CPE, to my knowledge the only Linksys product with a good radio, but they've replaced the radio with some junk in later versions. Again, an Orinoco will do the trick. You need to ensure that the clients use good quality kit because client comms problems will kill the performance for everyone. You can also look forward to problems like hidden nodes, where a heavy user can essentially block out everyone else who's trying to access the service. This is not a theoretical problem, I've seen it happen.

I'd say someone like oscarBravo could spend a few minutes on this and explain the ins and outs. The smart thing to do is to go for an install that's proven. The IrishWAN guys can tell you what to do as well. I don't know if the DublinWAN is still in existence, but they used to have a pretty decent site on this stuff.

You should be able to get about a 10km range if you do this right.

neon_glows

Sorry fuzzy didnt mean to suggest that your trying to make money of it, merely was trying to get it accross that it wouldnt be my intention, just how id worded it came across wrong.

Okay since early today and seeing your post i did some research and its starting to get me very interested. Im still a little baffled but getting more educated as i go along, is it possible you could PM me your msn address and maybe we could chat, swap info and generally help each other.

I plan on definately doing this by summer, for the moment i may try WLAN myself and a mate apprx 600ft away from each other using an antenna and 2xAP's i presume? we can see each others houses from my roof i reckon but he may have to mount an antenna aswell or his ap on his roof for LOS.

Gone West

Sure neon. Where are you based, just out of interest? You probably wont need 2 aps to connect to your mate. Just mess round with what you have and see if you can make a link. I'll lend you my precious pringles cantenna!(google it if you dont know what im talking about).

My advice is read up on everything you can online, there are some really good sites out there about wifi. The O'reilly book "Building wireless community networks" is great as well. Try wardriving if you have the equipment also!

Sorry I dont use MSN anymore, I was in the states for a few months and i've migrated to AIM. My AIM name is peter0jv

Peanut

For client installations (client in terms of they're the people connecting to the access point), try to avoid using any co-ax if at all possible. Unless you're really stuck for cash, you're far better off going for an integrated antenna/wireless unit, with either ethernet or USB cable coming out of it.

There's some on http://www.wi-pipe.net/, also omniserv-inc.com used to stock the osbridge range but their site appears to be down at the moment.

Webmonkey

Wi-Pipe have good USB ones alright. They handy for a single computer connecting but when its a whole network connecting then it can get a little more complicated.
As for routing software, I am actually using STAROS (www.staros.com) as an operating system on a 64mb confact flash card. It's excellent software and it's what most of the Irishwan guys are using.

If anyone wants to PM me too i'll be willing to help them.
my msn is in my profile too but i amn't on that often.

Webmonkey

Gone West

I'll PM you when I start this thing (won't be until may). Hopefully I can get a link going without too many problems, but we'll see.