Wireless Internet options

[drew at drewtaylor.com (Drew Taylor)]

That is an interesting idea! Unfortunately the area I'm in is all 
residential so I think my chances of finding an existing dedicated 
connection is slim. If the price is right, I think it would be an easy sell 
to my neighbors, and possibly any people in the buildings on either side. 
The only downside is that my building only has 5 apartments, so I either 
have to get something cheap enough to accomodate this limitation, or sell 
to the next door buildings. I'm definitely technical enough to pull it off, 
and even configure computers as necessary. So that is not really an issue 
for me.

One thing I'm considering is once I get the connection (whatever it is) 
into the building is to use a wireless AP with an antenna on my patio to 
make the connection available to neighbors. Doing this would eliminate ugly 
Cat 5 running up the outside of the building (no go for my wife I'm sure!) 
and drilling holes (landlord probably would not like it). Of course, going 
wireless means I'm concerned with people getting access w/o paying for it. 
I've looked into the NoCat gateway, which looks like it solves the access 
problem, but I'm open to other options. I don't even mind a little leaching 
as long as they aren't saturating the connection DL pr0n, etc. Anyone with 
more experience in this area?

Drew

At 07:49 AM 8/21/02 -0400, Warren E. Agin wrote:
>I also live in the NE, and had a similar problem. The building next to ours
>had been wired with a T-1 (they had a dot-com as a tenant at one point and
>its staff had done the work), so we brought a line into our basement and
>wired our building too. A basic hub and lots of Cat 5 cable were all the
>equipment required. Cost: about $250 each apartment to wire the building,
>$250 per apartment as a buy-in to the other building (to reimburse them for
>their initial equipment investment) and, with about 24 units using the
>service, $40 a month. For this, I get access to an underutilized T-1, a
>stable connection, and static IP.

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Drew Taylor                | Freelance web development & consulting
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