Temporary Wireless Service For An Outdoors Event? 213
SBECK writes "I've been asked to come up with an estimate of how much it would cost to provide wireless internet service for a small convention being held at a campground. That would entail renting or buying enough wireless access points to give coverage to the area and getting temporary satellite Internet service. Unfortunately, I've never done any of this, so I'm floundering. I'd love to get some pointers from anyone who has any experience setting up something like this. What ISP services provide temporary satellite service for something like this?"
Uplink? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Uplink? (Score:3, Informative)
Cheap generic routers with third party firmware (Score:5, Informative)
I would recommend using cheap AP's designed for home use and a third party firmware that allows them to link up and form a mesh.
The Linksys WRT54G is about $70 or less on Amazon and with third party firmware it can be linked into a mesh using something called WDS.
You can also add PoE and larger antennas quite reasonably.
See the Sveasoft site [sveasoft.com] for more information.
Re:Uplink? (Score:5, Informative)
Bi-directional has been available for a few years now. Sheesh I get enough spam for it in my mailbox, some of it from my isp(earthlink) who also sends adds for dsl, which isn't available within my zip or and of the neighboring zips.
Mycroft
psand have been doing this in the UK (Score:5, Informative)
Direcway (Score:4, Informative)
-Pascal
Line of sight? (Score:5, Informative)
You may only need 2 directional antenas instead of a satilite uplink.
more info please? (Score:5, Informative)
I've organised a few LAN-parties (up to ~250 attendants) and providers are more than willing to help you out. Also talk to one of your local IT shops, they usually don't mind you using their stock for this kind of event for a small rental fee. As an example: for a LAN-party for 100 participants we paid about 200,-- in fees for the whole network infrastructure & server park. We got to use 3 3com superstack switches and 5 dual xeon servers. The internet router (cisco 2600 series) was provided by the ISP. We just hooked the stuff up & had a great party. The help provided by both the ISP & the IT-shop was tremendous. All the help we got was from volunteers of those companies... they only asked free entrance in the gaming contest in return. Oh, and some beers :).
Insightful?? NO, just wrong (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry, this is wrong. Check out DirecWay [direcway.com] for at least one provider for 2 way sat comms.
Re:Ask Burning Man? (Score:5, Informative)
Sponsors? (Score:5, Informative)
"WiFi hotspot courtesy of Apple|Linksys|Lucent" blah blah blah... I know in France, Apple sponsors big events organized by the municipality and lends quite a lot of equipment. Maybe you should try.
Mesh networking (Score:5, Informative)
Thomas Krag & Co. also maintain a wiki [wire.less.dk] that you may find useful.
Mobile Mesh [mitre.org] runs in user-land and is covered by the GPL. It seems to get the best reviews.
-- Douglas
Re:Direcway (Score:5, Informative)
Lincsat is trying to get the DW4000 modems out the door, and is offering a deal of $499CDN with dish, free installation, and 'only' $49.95 for the first two months. After that, the price goes up to the regular $79.95/month for the remainder of the two year contract.
Re:Direcway (Score:5, Informative)
This is not inexpensive to setup - the hardware isn't cheap (though you might find it on E-bay). BUT, the major issue is that in the US, you have to have a licensed installer because the DW6000 has a built-in uplink. Of course, if you know someone who has is licensed and is willing to do it, you can save there.
And, having had quite a bit of experience with Direcway, if you have any kind of bad weather, you may have no connectivity. Rain is your enemy.
Re:Satellite rental (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Line of sight? (Score:4, Informative)
Why not try negotiating with the site owner about having the system installed permanently, that way the costs can be recovered from users over a long time, so an expensive solution might become viable?
If you can get an ADSL line to the site, it gets easier and you only need standard stuff, firewall, router, WiFi access points and so on. It would be best to have a caching proxy server, it can take a lot of load off the line as many people might be looking at the same sites. All of this is straightforward Linux/BSD/Windoze (if you really must) territory, the only thing difficult is the telecom infrastructure. Oh, and watch out for electrical safety regulations, there are lots of potential difficulties, and you reall do need to know your local regulations, and comply with them, or use low-voltage batteries for the lot.
I would ask the local telecom provider how much a decently fast line would cost before messing with satellite systems. The people who supply networking, cable TV, or voice comms in that geographic area are the people who know. In the UK, which does not help you very much, BT can and will provide a voice line or lines (you could aggregate the bandwidth with multiple modems) anywhere, or an ISDN line in most places, ADSL gets slightly harder because of the distance limit. All this is at a cost, of course......
Re:Uplink? (Score:4, Informative)
Try Starband for 700-800ms latency. Reasonably reliable IP service for an office of 8 users in very remote Colorado mountain country, although their call center blows chunks. I can even VNC (through SSH) to that office, it's slow but the link doesn't drop and it's useable.
--
Karma and Foes, who cares.
in other news (Score:3, Informative)
do what I do when consulting: say anything is possible, but estimate something that can't possibily be affordable.
PS - Most campgrounds have one residential unit on the lot; its usually where the owners live and it usually can get cable. Contact the local cable company to see if they can provide high speed internet service to the residence, then base your wireless out of the residency (something on the roof, then repeaters)
Maybe this is close to what you're looking for (Score:4, Informative)
Here are some people with experience: (Score:2, Informative)
The CCC Camp 2003 was a really cool event [xs4all.nl], and i really hope there are going to be more camps like this in the future (thanks, guys!).
Long Range WiFi Connection (Score:3, Informative)
where is this event? (Score:4, Informative)
Some cases you can have the phone company provision a line to the site (though you generally need a few weeks to make this happen). It is possible that the site already has phone/dsl service (unless it's out in the middle of nowhere).
One of the best options is to see if there is a wireless provider in the area and back haul a connection from them, in some cases there are many free/opensource type communities that run their own wireless core network. Look at settle wireless or the BAWUG (Bay area wireless user group) as they have done point to point backhauls to a park so everyone could surf while they were there... backhaul with some good equipment then use some dlinks or linksys units for the WLAN
Make sure AP's and backhaul are on seperate channels too..seen some people doing backhaul with 802.11a equipment (modifed) which is sometimes cheap to buy, and less bleedover signal in the spectrum. Oh.. lastly.. Trees are not your friend! they will kill your signal, don't bother trying to do this in a forest.
-b
Coverage (Score:4, Informative)
One problem with "hopping" is that occasionally if one of the access points in the middle of the link goes down, you may need to reset each of the other AP's down the line to get them back up and running.
We also ran into some interesting problems such as the time that around 8am in the morning our coverage started dropping when all the houses around the course started turning on their microwaves. You can never guarantee that the coverage you have at one time will be consistent throughout the day.
Along with a power supply and an access point, we also bought these special antennas that could be attached to camera tripods to give us a mini cell tower like setup. Oh yeah, and lesson learned, don't take those down during a thunderstorm.
Yagi antenna (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Yagi antenna (Score:1, Informative)
skycasters will rent you a two-way internet dish (Score:2, Informative)
Mesh networks (Score:2, Informative)
Sprint PCS Data Link, WAP and big omni antenna (Score:3, Informative)
Transportable Satellite Internet System (Score:3, Informative)
Linksys stuff is aweful in my experiences (Score:3, Informative)
The linksys WAP11s and WMP54g wireless PCI card were just plain terrible. Did not work as advertised. Doing WEP across two WAP11s in AP/Repeater mode causes instant lockup of the repeater. I spent an entire month on the phone with their Indian tech support until one of them finally admitted that it was a known problem that they've duplicated in their lab. Unfortunately after a month the vendors don't take products back and linksys refuses to refund my money so I'm stuck with the crap. On that note... if you DO want to use linksys stuff, let me know... hehe.
The netgears do it just fine. After I put the netgear APs in place everything worked well but randomly the linksys would just drop signal and nothing short of disable/enable on the card (from windows) or a reboot would bring it back up.
I finally replaced it with a netgear card and the problem is solved.
No, it won't. (Score:3, Informative)
I've seen the output from a rental Honda generator on an oscilloscope and it's pretty clean too. I use two of these generators to power sound (about 3kW of amplifier output) and computer equipment for five hours on a parade float in the summer with no problems.
Add a double-conversion UPS (probably you already have one in your office) between the generator and your equipment and that will let you refuel the generator without shutting all your equipment down.
Use an outdoor WAP (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Linksys stuff is aweful in my experiences (Score:1, Informative)
I agree that Linksys firmware is terrible. That is why there is a thriving marker in third party firmware. It's not the hardware, it's the Linksys firmware that sucks. Do what I did - replace it!
Re:Uplink? (Score:3, Informative)
RBGAN (Score:1, Informative)
one warning though - its quite costly. you pay per megabyte (and through the teeth).
An RV with MOTOSAT sounds perfect. (Score:3, Informative)
Burning Man? (Score:4, Informative)
You need Magic Bike (Score:1, Informative)
http://magicbike.net/about.html
Nethazile(at)Yahoodot(com)
Ask the right people (Score:3, Informative)
Forget satellite, find a wireless isp that will rent you the gear and handle the setup. The complexity of the project is too high to ebay and figure it out yourself, especially for a short-term event. In regards to cost, a minimum expectation is $2000, with a reasonable ceiling being $6000. Your results may vary.