wireless home network....distance capabilities..

[gigapet]

I'm moving into a single bedroom apartment and It is already set up for cable broadband access. Now my friend she lives in the apartment building next door....which is quite literally 8 feet away. Now i was thinking we could split the bill and configure a wireless network between our apartments and builidings. Now my questions are is this feasable? What is the range of the wireless signal? If it is possible what equipment would you recommend?

NOTE: We are college students so budget is tight!

 

[JackMDS]

It is not legal to do so!

 

[gigapet]

why?

say it wasnt an apartment say it was a two family home is taht still illegal?

Why would they make wireless networking equipment if it was illegal?

 

[gigapet]

I'm not talking about legality I'm talking about feasability .........

so is it possible?

What is the range of the signal?

What equipment is recommended

 

[JackMDS]

Originally posted by: gigapet
why?

say it wasnt an apartment say it was a two family home is taht still illegal?

Why would they make wireless networking equipment if it was illegal?

Follow this rational you can take any body property and pretend that they are family.

 

[gigapet]

regardless, does anybody have a useful answer for me?

 

[Shide1]

If it is next door then it will likely work fine. Last year at my apartment I could pick up a wireless signal from 2 floors up, but it was weak. If it is close and on the same floor you should not have a problem.

 

[gigapet]

Originally posted by: Shide1
If it is next door then it will likely work fine. Last year at my apartment I could pick up a wireless signal from 2 floors up, but it was weak. If it is close and on the same floor you should not have a problem.

so what hardware would you recommend then

 

[owensdj]

gigapet, not that I'm advocating how you're going to use the wireless equipment, but you'll probably want to go with 802.11b(Wi-Fi) wireless equipment over faster standards due to the greater range. 802.11b is still far faster than any cable or DSL broadband home account.

What I would do is set it up so that your wireless router is as close to your friend's apartment building as possible. You may need to get a long ethernet patch cable to run from your cable modem to the wireless router if it's far away. Try to setup the wireless router so it can transmit through a window rather than through a wall.

I like Netgear products, so I would say the Netgear MR814 802.11b Wireless Router would be a good choice. Your friend's computer will need a 802.1b wireless network card, if the machine doesn't already have wireless. If it's a notebook computer, get the Netgear MA521 802.11b Wireless PC Card. If it's a desktop machine, get the Netgear MA311 802.11b Wireless PCI Adapter.

 

[Soybomb]

Originally posted by: JackMDS
It is not legal to do so!

It may be against your ISP's terms of service (which could result in them terminating your account), but it may not be, some ISP's don't mind. Sometimes selling the service is better than having no one buy it. DSL is still pretty expensive here and we don't have a problem with selling it to say a frat house and letting them setup a router to share it. If we didn't one person probably couldn't afford it and then we'd have nothing because they'd use the free university dial up. Given a large house of unrelated people sharing a connection, or two people who live close to each other, the two people would still work out to be better even if not ideal for us economically.

Should work fine as long as the walls don't have some funky construction.

 

[JackMDS]

Many ISPs stipulate that you can share with your family, but can not sell bandwidth. There was even law suits filed concerning this issue.