How-to For Small Wan

[nikster]

Hi,

I have DSL and a phone number in the village, but I am going to move to my newly built house on the hill soon. My problem is migrating the DSL there. I am 2km from the telecom switch, new house about 5km, probably too far for DSL.

So I am thinking I get them to move my DSL to another house in the village, or within the 4km limit, and then cover the remaining distance with another technology.

WiFi + Pringles cans would be an option, there's a line of sight to the neighbor who would not at all mind sharing. Neighbor could then beam to me and other neighbor.

We could probably also lay cables, but I don't know what kind of technology (cable-bound) goes that far, I know that Ethernet doesn't.

WiMax would be ideal but I have yet to see any end-user equipment for that.

Other than that it would be Satellite (expensive and slow), GPRS (cheap and dead-slow), or waiting for 3G (years and years). I use this for work, so I don't mind paying some money for it. If Satellite was actually reaching the speeds it's promising it would be fine, but I have heard bad things about that. Separate post on Satellite option.

[Simmo]

I'd confirm with the phone co first about the distance , 5km is at the outer edge of doable on DSL depending on the equipment used & copper quality. You might have to pester them to try it out.

WiFi with homemade antennas sounds like the cheapest option - plenty of guides on the web to set that up. Other options would be ATM or fiber runs , both hideously expensive.

WiMAX looks more and more like vapourware each passing year.

Edited September 6, 2006 by Simmo

[nikster]

I'd confirm with the phone co first about the distance , 5km is at the outer edge of doable on DSL depending on the equipment used & copper quality. You might have to pester them to try it out.

WiFi with homemade antennas sounds like the cheapest option - plenty of guides on the web to set that up. Other options would be ATM or fiber runs , both hideously expensive.

WiMAX looks more and more like vapourware each passing year.

Thanks, this is great information!! I will have to get them to put my phone cable up and pay for the cable myself, so I can get good quality. It will probably more be a question of price...

Long-distance WiFi would be a lot cheaper but also problematic when the router goes down. On the other hand, I could get a really high-end router... all I need is one that doesn't get messed up and that doesn't need to be =shut down= in order to resolve problems.

The one I have is not bad, it's a Zyxel 600H series. I don't know if it ever needed to be shut down or if a simple restart would have been enough - the call center always advises to shut down and disconnect all cables.