Need a wireless network to go about 3.5-4mi through the mountains of West Virginia...

[CZroe]

I've never met a more ungrateful b!tch than my sister-in-law, and my last visit confirmed it 10x over. Anyway, I refuse to let her children, my niece and nephew, suffer just because she owes the DSL/phone company thousands.

Their Huges Sat. "broadband" service is worse than no Internet connection at all. I sh!t you not: I spent all day trying to download a 5MB driver so that I could have the computer fixed before driving home and it timed out after hours of super-slow progress every time. I ended up just driving 3.5-4mi to my brother's house (yes, they are separated) to grab it on a USB drive from his cable modem and go back... at almost 2AM. I was supposed to be four states away and in bed at that point.

She refuses to just pay up and settle with the DSL company, even though it's a total GIFT for them to even service her area... the cable co servicing 3.5mi away, Charter, is "on the line" with another, Sudden Link, and yet NEITHER service her area. I don't want the gaming PC I just gave my nephew to be useless for online multiplayer games. I already watched as he ignored me and tried to start Team Fortress 2 from his brand-new Orange Box he got for Christmas. He's got an 8800GT for God's sake!

I need cheap solutions!

A local thrift store had a boat-load of Ricochet wireless modems, which could do about 256KB and work point-to-point at about 1mi with no antenna modifications. Would I need to get impossible height and attract lightning to use these or will an antenna mod suffice? I'm sure I won't be using them with Vista, but I guess I can tie them to a junk PC for sharing the connection. I need to ask if they have a friendly connected neighbor that I don't know about, because that would help tremendously.

What are my other non-Ricochet options?

 

[Fardringle]

Can you get direct, unobstructed line of sight (no trees, buildings, mountains, etc) between the two houses? If not, don't bother because it won't work.

From your description, it sounds like they need to call Hughes and have them fix the satellite connection. My guess would be that there is something wrong with the antenna, or the antenna might simply not be pointed directly at the satellite. Satellite works just fine for Internet browsing. It will be slow for gaming due to high ping times, but I suspect that it's the best you're going to get at her house until she pays what she owes to the DSL provider.

If you are serious about getting the connection issues resolved, it would probably be much cheaper to pay off the ISP than it would be to get wireless equipment capable of broadcasting that far even if you can get perfect line of sight to the house.


I haven't used Ricochet modems before, but from what I have read on the Internet about them, they don't communicate directly with each other, but work as a "dial-up" modem to connect wirelessly to nearby ISP access points.