Would a wirless router work in this situation?

digiman

My family home is unable to recieve broadband, but my father's company now can. His workshop is about 200m from our house but in a different exchange. If we were to get broadband in his workshop would we be able to buy a reasonably priced wireless router that would send the signal up to our house, which is about 200m away and at an elevation about 10m higher than the workshop.
If there was one that would do this what price, how would it perform in pooe weather, would I expect much packet loss?
I know that eircom provide you with one, but I doubt the signal would travel this far, please correct me if I am wrong as this would be ideal.
I was thininking of using Cat5 cable to connect it either, but from what I can remember I would probably need a lot of boosters to send the signal this dar over a single line, this would also be very unpractical!!

Some help please.

JNive

if you have clear line of site, id recommed getting a directional antennae for the worksop and mount it outside a window even, then on your end use a similar antennae conencted to a PCI Wi-Fi card which allows you to remove/replace the antennae.

Obviously, first give it a go with the antennaes built in alraedy. just make sure you put the wireless point in the workshop ona window or something, viewable from your house, and the same on your end. if it doesnt work or keeps cutting out, then get directional antennae

Should be perfectly ok. :-)

digiman

Any idea how much that setup would cost? Also how secure would this be in regards of other people stealing my bandwidth, or would the directional attena more or less limit reception to my house?

JNive

directional antennae makes no difference to security, it only focuses the signal to a narrow beam, hence travellign further, rather than the standard omni-directional spread of normal aerials.

You'd still want to set up WPA or WEP on the router etc, and definitely MAC address restriction also if possible

Foxwood

digiman wrote:

Any idea how much that setup would cost? Also how secure would this be in regards of other people stealing my bandwidth, or would the directional attena more or less limit reception to my house?

You can get an antenna for anything from €40 to €140 and more. In fact, Komplett have a small directional antenna for €20 at the moment. Note that not all routers have replacable antenna (perhaps people who have recently gotten wireless routers from BT, digiweb or eircom can advise on what's currently being provided), so if you have to buy a router, you'll need to do some further research first. (There's more than one type of connector, for example.

200M isn't all that far. If you could get power right in the middle, 2x100metre runs of CAT5 with a small powered 4 port switch in the middle would probably work okay. And you'll need to enable the usual WPA encryption if you go the wireless route, even with a directional antenna.

nilhg

200 m is no problem with any sort of decent directional antenna the signal should be perfect with no packet loss no matter what the weather. I have had a setup similar to what you need running for the last two years (longer distances and to three houses), without any problem.

I would strongly recommend that you think through what your needs from the broadband connection will be going forward, ie how many PCs or xbox/ps2s might you have, do you think you will need VOIP? The answers to these questions will indicate what gear you will need.

John

Foxwood

Sorry, I meant to include this link to Komplett to give you an idea of what sort of choices, and what sort of prices you'd be looking at for antennas.

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