Despite being promised by the local incumbent telco, a friend for mine has now been waiting for months to get a DSL connection at his home in the countryside. Doesn't look to good for him. He's finally fed up of waiting and has started to experiment with Wifi as about a kilometer away people are connected to the DSL network. His first experiments are quite promising. With the kit shown below in the images (click on the pictures to enlarge), he was able to get a stable wifi connection between the access point and the strange looking antenna and a notebook with built in wifi antenna over a distance of 1 kilometer. Now he's found someone who's willing to share his DSL line with him about a kilometer away, line of sight in between them. Two "Yagi" antennas and a second access point are on the way and the end of Internet-less days are hopefully over for him soon. To be continued...
Are you being deliberately vague about the details to protect your friend (and especially your friend's friend) from any legal fallout resulting from sharing a connection in this way?
Posted by: Stuart Mudie | December 15, 2006 at 02:09 PM
Hey Stuart,
no, not at all. Wifi connections between buildings in Germany are quite legal. What you have to take care of is to stay within the limits given by EN300328 which says that the maximum transmission power in the 2.4 GHz band must not exceed 20 dbm EIRP (100mW). Also, there are DSL operators in Germany who allow Internet sharing.
Cheers,
Martin
Posted by: Martin | December 15, 2006 at 10:17 PM