Wifi On The Beach

A great step-by-step story of how one man got started with 802.11b wireless is found at the San Francisco Wireless Broadband website. The site describes how he bought Linksys WAP11 access points, set one up at his home, and went down to the beach 1.2 miles away. With off the shelf hardware, and the tin can waveguide antenna he was able to connect wirelessly to his home with no problems. He goes on to describe other distances he attempted - up to 4.7 miles with a reliable connection, up for two weeks. Other observations include that while he achieved 1 Mbps downstream and 300-400 Kbps upstream with the home made antennas, commercial 24 dBi parabolic grid antennas made by Pacific Wireless give him 3.5Mbps both directions. Regardless, I found this article fasinating, and incouraging. The only disapointment I have, is that The line-of-sight in Mentor, Ohio is nothing like San Francisco, most likely thwarting any large wireless networks…