

Ask HN: How can we get better internet? - drewcrawford

I'm a undergrad CS student in the middle of nowhere, East TX.  I'm here for a little-known but awesome CS program.<p>Unfortunately, internet access here is pretty awful.  I live in an old (50 years?) dormitory.  IT bills us about $1.50/GB, and it's filtered like you wouldn't believe (packet inspection,  no 
bittorrent, VPNs, lots of spurious firewalling...).  Unfortunately, moving not an option, and IT is deaf to student concerns.<p>Along with several other angry CS majors, I've been paying Clearwire (pre-Wimax ISP, claims 1.5mbit) about $40/month, but lately they've been getting on our case for "over-usage" and are threatening to cut us off.  We're talking about 2-3GB/week of traffic.  They do some light packet shaping as well, so we're looking for something better.<p>I'm only about 600-700ft from the nearest neighborhood, so there's some talk of paying someone to get a fat pipe and figuring out how to microwave it to where I live.  I don't know enough about the equipment I'd need, or what would fit in the budget (Motorola stuff looks expensive!).  Administration takes a very dim view of this sort of thing, so the equipment on my end would have to be indoor.  Any recommendations?<p>AFAIK, the buildings are too old to be wired properly for DSL/Cable (or not worth Ma Bell's effort).  Satellite requires an external mount, which is a no-no.<p>Can any clever hackers out there think of something we missed?
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wmf
Sounds like a pretty bad situation. Look at <http://www.ubnt.com/> if you want
dirt-cheap long-range wifi.

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drewcrawford
What kind of antennas would I need to make something like this work?

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wmf
Most of the radios have built-in antennas.

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lann
That distance is nothing for a point-to-point wifi link. Buy (or build)
yourself a cheap directional antenna for both ends and you should get a solid
link with line of sight.

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drewcrawford
Unfortunately I'm facing the wrong way to do a p2p to the nearest neighborhood
(window maybe 160 degrees off?). Building is pretty much solid concrete (50
years old). Nearest house in line-of-sight from the window is closer to a
mile. There's been some discussion about setting something up on the far side
of the building and either running cable or setting up a repeater in the
building to hit us on the far side, but it would be a big hassle.

~~~
chronomex
UBNT, as another poster mentioned, makes some good wifi products. I know
someone who's used a pair of Nanostations ( <http://metrix.net/ubiquiti-
nanostation-2-p-110.html> ) to do about five miles, crossing a bay beach-to-
beach. I'm sure that a mile won't be a great problem for these units. I've got
one myself, they're quite worth it.

I'm sure you can figure out some sort of mount that'll fit, for example using
some double-sided tape on the inside of a window.

~~~
drewcrawford
Thanks for pointing me to UBNT. Looks like their wifi-range products are dirt
cheap, but that frequency hinges so much on LOS that I don't think it can go
the distance. I've got some 250mW 2.4GHZ test hardware that I set up, and it
can do 300+yds with LOS but not 20m through the building.

