Internet connectivity in a remote location

This techtip is about getting Internet connectivity away from the city. Also people in a small village deserve to enjoy fast internet connection.

Living in Austria in east Styria among hills and forests may be very good for ones health, but not so good for ones internet bandwidth. After using a normal dialup (theoretical 56kbps) for few months, considering the fact that I work with Gentoo Linux as my main OS, the limit of nerves, time and money was reached. I had to find an alternative.

Checking with Telekom Austria monopoly, I understood that ADSL will not be available in my village in the near future. The obvious step was a satellite connection.
Ordering a package from Astranet was very easy, and also not so expensive. Everything came within few days. The installation was trivial (just connect few cables - with no much place for mistake, direct the satellite dish with the help of a small nice tool, configure the modem they give, and hop - you have fast internet).
The problems, as expected, were very slow uplink (exactly the same dialup that I used to have), the cost of being connected (same rate, but shorter time), and any time critical service (like Voice over IP) can be forgotten.

An innovative solution was needed.
A check for availability of ADSL in neighbour villages (by typing phone number from the neighbour village in the Telekom ADSL availability page) had given a non-negative answer. It means that ADSL is MAYBE available.
This was already a reason for hope. Some luck was around also - the closest house from this village is only 250 meters from my house. There is also a line of sight between the houses, and they both share the same electricity line.
It means that if only there is ADSL connection in this house, I can transfer it to my place. The first task was to convince this farmers family to let me install networking equipment in their house. They were very kind, and agreed, as long as I pay any expense. I have ordered immediately.
It was another 3 months until the ADSL got really installed in this house (did I already say something about monopoly?). Few hardware problems with the router, but is started working. Now the only thing was connecting my house too.
Research regarding the network over power line, as well as wireless equipment have lead me to the following solution:

home SWITCH - Linksys AP (2) ~ 250m~ Linksys AP (1) - Dlink Router - ADSL modem
192.168.1.X - 192.168.1.252 192.168.1.251 - 192.168.1.1 - 10.0.0.138

Both Access Points are Linksys WAP11 (model WAP11DE 2.6)
AP (1) is configured as Access Point
AP (2) is configured as Access Point client (with the MAC address of AP 1)
AP (3) [optional] is the same as AP 2 - to connect another remote LAN. It functions perfect together with the others.

The WAP11 model was chosen because of the built-in 20dBm Antenna which can reach up to 350m, and the price - less than 50€. At that time (and maybe still today), 802.11g devices had only 15dBm Antenna which was not enough. Considering that ADSL will be less than the 11Mbps that 802.11b offers for long time, one lose nothing regarding bandwidth.

Both AP are kept outside the window in a plastic bag, protecting them from rain. They have survived the Austrian winter with (-14) Celsius deg. As I mentioned before - I have used *NO* extra antennas.

The Dlink router is D-Link di604. It is connected to the ADSL modem which was supplied by Austria Telekom (SpeedTouch 510) and it is configured with PPTP.

There is a keep alive cron job that takes care that the connection is up:

#!/bin/sh

IP1=X.X.X.X
IP2=Y.Y.Y.Y
TRIES=1
SLEEP=30
LOG=/dev/null
REBOOT_CMD="wget http://192.168.1.1/cgi-bin/rebo --http-user=admin --http-passwd=mypasswd"

ping -c $TRIES $IP1 &> $LOG || ping -c $TRIES $IP2 &> $LOG || $REBOOT_CMD > $LOG
sleep $SLEEP
ping -c $TRIES $IP1 &> $LOG || ping -c $TRIES $IP2 &> $LOG || $REBOOT_CMD > $LOG

The ADSL bill is on my name. Only the telephone number which the ADSL works belong to the neighbour, so it is almost like having ADSL at home.

The connection is fast. My account is 768/128 kBit/s and I measure 500 kbps. The extra delay using the wireless connection is 2-3 mSec. This connection is also good enough for Voice over IP, and I use an Asterisk system with "Grandstram IP Phone" which is good enough for calls inland and abroad for private and business purposes.

This story was first published in German on LUGA mailing list (Linux User Group Austria) during November 2004.

(

) [ About Us ] [ Services ] [ Speciality ] [ Techtips ] [ Contact Us ]