Temporary Wireless Service For An Outdoors Event?

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?"

Sell your wireless

[Mc_Anthony]

Here in Pasadena, many people who live the in the homes surrounding the Rose Bowl will sell your wireless connections during an event that are easily available near the parking lots. The connections go anywhere from $100 to as low as $10 for an IP. It can be very handy!

Personally, I use my cell/Palm-PDA to surf when I'm away from home/work. I love my Samsung i500!!!!

Ask Burning Man?

[Chalybeous]

I don't know much about this kind of technology, but I know that there are similar setups going on at the Burning Man [burningman.com] festival every year. Maybe it's worth looking around the site to see if you can find anecdotes and contact info for people who've done the same.
Also, the Mars Society [marssociety.org] uses satellite hookups to keep in touch with its field stations. Perhaps they can give you some pointers?

Depending on where the event is held and how well cellphone signals can be received, you might also want to try a mobile phone carrier. A lot of the larger UK events like Glastonbury are, I believe, getting support in this area from larger telcos. It may be more complex, and will probably involve getting everyone a new PCMCIA card, but it could be an option.

Sorry I couldn't be of more help; sadly IANA techie, but I hope these couple of snippets I've seen around the net are of use to you.

Re:Line of sight?

[zakezuke]

You may only need 2 directional antenas instead of a satilite uplink.

Depending on whether this is a comercial project or not, one might be able to use the amature shortwave / longwave bands. It has it's limits, but it's not limited to line of site as with microwave.

Static or mobile devices?

[Robmonster]

One thing to consider is whether the radio client dewvices are going to be sttic (like laptops left setup on a desk) or mobile (like handheld PDA's for example)

If you are having static devices that get setup, connected then left in place for the duration then you can get away with using cheaper network switches. However, if youa re using mainly mobile devices then you can get disconnections as the user roams between access points on different cheaper switches.

This has happened to some of our customers using handheld barcode scanners as they network equuipment could not perform the handoff between access pints quick enough, logging the radio user off.

Not really directly answering your question but its something to consider.

Re:Ask Burning Man?

[Ian Peon]

You're thinking of the PlayaNet [playanet.org] folks. Really interesting stuff.

They get the additional fun of having to put up with Dr Megavolt [mit.edu]. Last time I was out there (a few years back) I chatted with a few guys trying to do some long wire runs and RF comms. Appearantly everytime Dr. Volt's van drove by and fired the Tesla, they'd lose another piece of gear!

Try a local computer provider...

[theirishman]

It depends on the country that you are in..but most of the small sercice providers will be able to help sort something like that out for you.. try talking to them..if they can not help directly they most likey know a company that can.

Even if you offer them a stand at the event to allow them to show off their services, you can probley get them to help out!!!

I know the manager, but not sure if they have what you need.

http://www.eurorent.ie

Satellite rental

[ayelvington]

I know that Direct-Way has a self aligning rental unit available on a daily basis. (Shipped to and from via Fedex) Power is going to be a challenge Please let us know how you pull this off! ay

Re:psand have been doing this in the UK

[spj524]

From the website:

Lessons Learnt:

There are more people with good suggestions than people with desire to carry them out.

Why not ad-hoc

[sgraine]

if you have enough clients the network will create itself.

Did it at the MASP

[6800]

Last year at the Mid Atlantic Star Party, directway was gatewayed into a field near Robbins, NC for a large group of amateur astronomers. www.masp.org now has the plans for 2004 and the 'internet' activity links to an invalid page. It worked quite well. They used an MS box for the gw, you could use the dw6000, I suppose, to better advantage. They also had multiple linux boxes running local web servering and the like. Not sure if they used squid or what but if so, it was a transparent proxy method. Cheers, Russ

Re:Direcway

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the biggest problem with direcway is the BS hourly cap they impose. You are only allowed 160M/hour with it using some crap 'emptying bucket' algorithm....basically as your download/upload, the transfer bucket 'fills', until you reach your cap. It 'drains' (allowing more download) as some bullcrap rate like 20kpbs, so you can get 1 good download and are pretty screwed for a while....

wifi at campsite

[Anonymous Coward]

I provided wifi for 500 people for a week at a
scout camp site in North Carolina by a satellite link last year.
For a bit of a write up see http://www.austintek.com/wifi/wifi.html#masp_2003
(disclaimer - page advertises my services).
The gear was all standard commodity WAPs. Except
for one linux laptop, all users were windows.
Laptops connected via dhcp. My gear was all linux, except for the satellite link which required M$.
I provided outbound e-mail, websurfing with a local squid, samba file shares for people to upload images from digital cameras. I wrote a local webpage with menu at the chuck wagon, schedules for speakers and events, exhibits.
Since the gear was basically my home
setup (except for the satellite link), the cost
was minimal. The real cost was the time to setup
and run the show. In the field I found that
the WAPs would freeze up every couple of hours
and would need to be power cycled.
I spent a lot of time helping
fix deranged Windows machines so that users could
connect by wifi. The range of skills of users was
large. Some people managed to connect without
coming to see me, while other people required
several hours of work on their machines before
the wifi client would fire up. Chasing people to
get info for the local webpage and writing it up
also took a lot of time.

Frickin' lasers for last miles

[Uninvited Guest]

Forget the sharks. If you have line of sight between your site and another site that has the bandwidth, consider using lasers to bridge the last few miles. You can get over a 100Mbit that way. This article is a summary of what's possible right now with "free space optics":
http://www.washingtontechnology.com/news /19_2/emer ging-tech/23327-1.html

Here are Cannon's frickin' lasers:
http://www.usa.canon.com/html/industrial_ canobeam/ canobeam/

Terabeam Elliptica, plus links to other free fpace optics:
http://www.freespaceoptics.com/Free_Space _Optics_T erabeam.html

LocustWorld

[Anonymous Coward]

Take a look at locustworld [locustworld.com]. Mesh routing that just works. Get at least one node with a real connection, then the rest route to it automatically.

Cellular is the easiest

[Nikker]

Well depending on your budget and how quick you want this over with you can call the cell carriers in your area and as an employee of one myself I know that they would love to talk to you. Call around and see what solutions they have it could be having cell phones connected to a router for service but i am pretty sure you could squeeze out a couple Mb/s. I'm not sure what youre intentions are (ie bandwidth required) but if you want happy campers a caching proxy mite be worth reading up on ;)

WISPA

[Anonymous Coward]

Go to www.wispa.org It is an association of professional wireless providers. They can help you set it up or do it for you if you prefer.

Bonnaroo

[serenarae]

From what I understand, Bonnaroo will have wireless net access over a 600 acre farm. That's a rather large undertaking if you ask me, but they're doing it :) Not too sure how, but I know linksys is a sponsor so... yeah :)

http://www.bonnaroo.com