[RndTbl] Point to point wireless

[Kevin McGregor]

Where is a good place to order Buffalo wireless equipment? How important is line-of-sight? Would it be reasonable to get a good connection across 270 feet (~82m) from inside one house to inside another, with trees and fences in the way? Two of the homes are 5.5 lots apart (across the backyard - no lane - and down five houses). I'd rather get a better connection and not blanket the neighbourhood with our signal if possible, which is why I'm wondering about a directional antenna.

----- Original Message -----
From: Adam Thompson <athompso at athompso.net>
Date: Tuesday, July 3, 2007 22:59
Subject: Re: [RndTbl] Point to point wireless
To: Kevin McGregor <kmcgregor at shaw.ca>
Cc: roundtable at muug.mb.ca

> 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
> 
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