The world according to Sven-S. Porst
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I have enjoyed wireless networking at several occasions so far: At my parents' house, when visiting various friends in the UK, when visiting Steffen, when visiting Jean, on my recent trip to the US. Wireless networks seem much more widespread in the US than they are here. I don't quite see how they could get me to pay for that service, though, as it is more a 'nice to have' thing. I don't usually need to check my e-mail for new spam urgently enough to go through registration pain &c. But this is not what I want to write about.
Here in Göttingen, the university has also built a wireless network. I spans most university buildings as well as many parts of the town. Depending on the weather and the position of people in our building, I may even have one dot of reception on my lowly Powerbook [first generation TiBooks have notoriously bad reception – much worse than the Pismo (I recently passed Pismo beach by a few miles) series, say]. Now the nice thing is that there are also certain 'big' antennas around on high buildings which let you use the wireless network at home if you have the adequate equipment.
It happens that from our balcony we have perfectly unobstructed view of one of these buildings and now we are considering to get a wireless link via the university rather than forking out a lot to Deutsche Telekom for their DSL offering.
As people have been nice but not particularly helpful when I inquired about this at the helpdesk today, I wonder
- What kind of equipment we'll need exactly to use that network in our flat with several computers attached via ethernet or even Aiport.
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Whether this is available in a single foolproof box rather than having to acquire, set up, and waste energy on a routing computer.
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How much this will cost.
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How good the quality of service in terms of speed and connection reliability is for such a solution. The distance to said building is rather long – 300m I'd guess – but people say that's not a big deal with a suitable antenna.
If you can offer any advice or experiences with such setups, please leave a comment or
send an e-mail.
March 30, 2004, 21:09
I am no expert on this and my personal experience with it is rather lacking, but I have a useful link for you, and I can tell you that this really won’t be all that hard. It seems the hardest part to me will be finding out how powerful of an antenna you will need.
http://homepage.mac.com/kelmac/kelmacnet/main.html
It’s a big page load, many pictures.
April 5, 2004, 15:40
Thanks for the link. That really looks like you can achieve a lot with wireless networking if you do it the right way. Very promising. I hope the hardware costs will remain reasonable.
April 6, 2004, 11:37
