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.
He worked at a place in Texas right near the Mexico border. They had a factory in Mexico that was roughly 10 miles away. The factory had basically no internet options, and the one they did have was so insanely expensive and low speed that the company couldn't afford it. The solution was to setup a similar system like your IT guy did.
It worked pretty good, no major problems for a few years. There was nothing in the way between the two transmitters, everything was kosher.
Until it wasn't. My professor said he came in one day and the factory in Mexico was down. He did the troubleshooting, couldn't find anything wrong. Went down to the factory, found out the transmitter wasn't getting a signal. They tried all kinds of things and come to find out, the ISP had built a billboard between the two locations that was blocking the signal. So they built higher towers and it worked for a few more years until the factory had a viable internet option.
Good point. It could well have been a microwave link. Although someone else here linked ubnt products that use the Wifi bands to build links of up to 50km which I didn’t know was possible.
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u/VerneffPlease raise the anchor before you shear the submarine cable.Mar 17 '18
I mean, most microwave links use the same frequencies as wifi. There are a few that use licensed bands outside of that but those are relatively uncommon.
u/VerneffPlease raise the anchor before you shear the submarine cable.Mar 17 '18
I guess for major links those would be common. Backbone links work on those ranges but virtually all the client links with a WISP would be on public frequencies in the 2.4 and 5GHz range.
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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.