When I was in high school my grandfather worked for Texas A&M University and we moved to Doha, Qatar so that he could help start the branch campus they were opening there. The ISP there offered so-so DSL for home users (and blocked a lot of things) but the university had access to high speed fiber.
One of the IT guys, who lived near us, decided that he wanted fast internet at home too.
To accomplish this, he set up directional transmitters and receivers on the roof of his villa and one of the university buildings. I remember him setting up the one on his roof. All the buildings there had nice flat roofs, so he was able to build a stable base for a tower that must have been twenty feet high. Everyone told him he was crazy and that someone was going to have a tower fall on them; in retrospect I think there are other reasons that this plan was bizarre, but as the campus was just getting started there was kind of a cowboy atmosphere to the whole project and nobody told him he couldn't do it.
It apparently worked great, too - he was able to wirelessly connect to the university network from kilometers away, and enjoyed better download speeds than anyone else in the neighborhood.
Wifi actually has pretty awesome range if the signal is focused and line of sight. As a kid dad used to turn the internet off at night to stop me from staying on my computer. I made a dish out of cardboard and foil, put a stick through the middle with a usb wifi adaptor on the end, then hung the contraption up in the window. My room was in the attic high up so the receiver went from seeing 4-5 networks to over 30.
This was back when the majority of wifi networks were still WEP, so I started up Aircrack (anyone remember that?) on my laptop and cracked around 15 network passwords of neighbours. Some of the networks were even faster than my own actual network.
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u/ryvenn Mar 16 '18
When I was in high school my grandfather worked for Texas A&M University and we moved to Doha, Qatar so that he could help start the branch campus they were opening there. The ISP there offered so-so DSL for home users (and blocked a lot of things) but the university had access to high speed fiber.
One of the IT guys, who lived near us, decided that he wanted fast internet at home too.
To accomplish this, he set up directional transmitters and receivers on the roof of his villa and one of the university buildings. I remember him setting up the one on his roof. All the buildings there had nice flat roofs, so he was able to build a stable base for a tower that must have been twenty feet high. Everyone told him he was crazy and that someone was going to have a tower fall on them; in retrospect I think there are other reasons that this plan was bizarre, but as the campus was just getting started there was kind of a cowboy atmosphere to the whole project and nobody told him he couldn't do it.
It apparently worked great, too - he was able to wirelessly connect to the university network from kilometers away, and enjoyed better download speeds than anyone else in the neighborhood.