[RndTbl] Point to point wireless

Adam Thompson athompso at athompso.net
Tue Jul 3 22:37:46 CDT 2007


Kevin McGregor wrote:
> Does anyone have some pointers (personal experiences, URLs, etc) on 
> how to set up a point to point (house to house) wireless network? I 
> and two geeky neighbours are thinking about setting up a private 
> internal network to connect our houses, and we're not sure where to start.
The standard Linksys router (WRT54G-style) won't be a great choice, for 
the main reason that someone else here has mentioned: crappy radios.
However, Buffalo seems to have mitigated most of the problems with the 
broadcom radio - we replaced all the WRT54Gs at work with Buffalo 
WHR-54s (or something like that - check out the chart at 
http://www.dd-wrt.com/) and instantly got easily double to triple the 
range of the Linksys units, despite being based on the same reference 
design.

I would suggest buying three Buffalos (cheaper than the Linksys, by 
mail-order only - no-one in the city seems to carry them), loading 
either OpenWRT or DD-WRT on them [I prefer DD-WRT, it seems more 
integrated], using the factory-default antennas, and EITHER putting them 
all in ad-hoc mode, or putting one of them (the geographically central 
one) in AP mode and the other two in client mode.

I would also strongly recommend you NOT put them in bridge mode, rather 
use them as proper routers - no need for NAT, specifically, but you 
really really really don't want all your broadcast and/or multicast 
traffic flooding the wireless side of things.

-Adam



More information about the Roundtable mailing list