Would this work?

My fiance has a store about 100 feet from our apartment and wants to get DSL for her business. If we put a router in the store, would we be able to surf the net wirelessly from our apartment?

 

It's highly possible. 100 ft. is within range, but it will depend on how many walls and floors it needs to go through and the thinkness and what the walls/floors are made of. wireless routers are pretty cheap and it does not hurt to try, but don't get the DSL with the assumption or plan that it will work for home as well, just consider it a bonus if it does work. I have my wireless router on the 2nd floor of my home and going through one wall(walls of homes are usually thinner than business walls) and I can take my notebook about 40 paces(~120ft) and get a 50% signal. My notebook will work with signals down to about 30% before I start getting packet loss and stuff really slows down. Another case is I can drive to the grocery store and sit in my car in the parking lot and surf at a 40% signal and the closest homes where the router could be are ~250 ft away, so it depends a great deal on the router as power output is different with different models.

good luck
Jack

"They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security" (Ben Franklin)
http://pbase.com/joneill

 

I suspect that the signal would have to go through a couple of exterior walls and that you would have difficulty using a plain vanilla configuration. That said, you should be able to setup a wireless bridge that would serve your needs. Get a couple of APs that (1) ideally have a wireless bridge configuration option or at least have a wireless client configuration option, and (2) that have external antenna connections. The Linksys WAP11 would work perfectly but I am sure there are plenty of others as well. Next, buy a couple of high powered directional antennas and connect one to each of your APs. HERE is a link to example antennas that would work for you. You'll also need a couple of very short length low loss cables for connecting the antennas to the radios (ask for them when you buy the antennas, but I'll warn you these cables aren't cheap - you definitely want them short, I'd suggest 12 inches). Hook all that up and it will connect the store to your apartment. During the configuration, be sure to turn off the diversity antenna setting and only enable the antenna mounting to which you connected the new external antenna. From the AP in your apartment you can either go straight into a computer using a crossover ethernet cable or you can feed into a switch and share the connection among multiple devices. If you have any questions, let us know and good luck to you!

 

You can always buy a booster, the one that advertise, Bi-Directional, cost about $100 at fry's Those work pretty good if you put it on the outside, basically it's an extended antena for the outdoor. But b4 you do something like that, make sure your security is tight.

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I suppose you could put a repeater outside between the two buildings, but you have some environmental challenges in keeping the thing running in a potentially high humidity high heat setting, not to mention the potential asthetic challenges of how to house and pull power to it in an attractive manner. I still think boosting the antenna power on each side makes far more sense. Keep in mind that decibels is a logarithmic scale so going from the 2 dBi antenna that comes on a typical AP to a 12 dBi antenna is a 10x boost in effective power. Plus that allows you to configure the APs as wireless bridges so that you specify a MAC address on each side and only connect to the corresponding device. That is about as tight of security as it is possible in a wireless setting.

 

Actually, you can setup a VPN server for additional security, which I'm recommending doing so, if you have the knowledge and extra money for it. I have my VPN running on top of the wifi since I have one of my desktop running 24/7 anyway.
<blockquote id='quote'> quote:<hr height='1' noshade id='quote'>Originally posted by jchastain

 

<blockquote id='quote'> quote:<hr height='1' noshade id='quote'>Originally posted by freeman