Building Wireless Community Networks, Second Edition

Online From Home,No Strings Attached

Around this time, I relocated to Sebastopol from San Francisco. By a staggering coincidence, the house we moved into happened to have clean line of sight to the antenna I had installed on the roof, more than half of a mile away. This provided a great tool for experimentation, as I now had a fixed signal at a distance with clear LOS, and could aim whatever kind of equipment I liked at it to see how well it would perform. I realized that a high-gain dish, pointed directly at the omni, could achieve a very good signal, even through walls and glass. I was so excited by the quality of the signal that I bungee-corded the dish to a chair with rollers, and rolled it around the house, while streaming a full-screen video on my laptop the entire time. Yes, a keen interest in wireless was now developing into a full-blown psychotic obsession, as the potential possibilities of long-distance, low-cost, high-speed communications played about in my mind.

I finally mounted the dish inside my attic, set up a makeshift access point, and found that I could have a stable 11Mbps connection from about six-tenths of a mile away, with a “stealth” dish under my roof that wouldn’t bother the neighbors. I used this connection for several months, through all kinds of weather (and I was very grateful of it: in my area, DSL and cable modems weren’t an option at the time).

Now that I had a proof-of-concept and parts list, I approached others in the company who live in the area, ...