Neighbourhood Connections Sharing?

Anyone know what's necessary to share a connection across a neighbourhood, i.e. someone lives on the 3rd floor of a complex, gets a 512K MW connection... what does one need to share that with the ppl across the street, or a few Kms down the road? Of course each one needs a wireless access card, but what about the access point? Router? With Telkom's prices this would be the cheapest way for all of us urban dwellers to go - but <b>what does one need??</b>

I get PC parts from Recton in CT so if anyone needs anyfing I'll be happy to resell at Rectron's price...!



<font color="navy"><font size="1"><b>Where others have progress, we have Telkom.</b>
Hellkom website - http://telkomsucks.0catch.com</font id="size1"></font id="navy">

You will need to setup 1 access point with a decent antenna, all the other people that want to connect will then connect to this access point, you will also need some decent ICS app and firewall.

Keep Surfing

Some proper cabling and an omni directional antennae, connected to your wireless access point/router.

If people further than a km or so are going to connect, you'd need a directional antennae pointing in their direction, and same for them. Line of sight is important here, if you can't see it, you can't connect to it.

<font color="blue">TRUTH does <u>not</u> <i>lie</i> in <font color="green">opinions</font id="green"> and <font color="green">perception</font id="green">... but in that which <i>conforms</i> to <font color="red">fact</font id="red"> and <font color="red">reality</font id="red"></font id="blue">

Hi

You will need a Wireless DSL gateway router to serve the DSL connection wirelessly to everybody you want to allow access to it. They will each need a Wireless access card in their PC's.

Cheers
Antowan

He who does not understand the value of war at the right time, cannot comprehend the value of life at any time - Anonymous

Of course, one has to continue pointing out that under the current legislative umbrella we have in this country, anything that provides communication and crosses property lines without a license is illegal, and good luck on getting a license. Sucks, but that's how it is.

Tharaxis,

As far as I can tell, it's not "property lines" that are the boundary, but any publically owned or operated road. That is, if you are setting up a very low-power Wi-Fi connection to your direct next door neighbour, you should be alright. If you cause interference on anybody's licensed band though (especially Telkom's) you can expect ICASA to come knocking.

Also, crossing any public road, even a small side street, even if to cross only to the property directly opposite yours, regardless of how you do it, is illegal and you can expect to be prosecuted if either Telkom or ICASA find you doing this.

Also, presently, I would not recommend buying or building any custom antennae and attatching it to your wireless gear. While buying and using Wi-Fi gear in SA is not illegal, using non standard antennae is, as our signal strength limit for unlicensed devices is extremely low (580 microWatts, or 0.5 miliWatts) and almost any non-standard antenna will be in violation.

Willie Viljoen
Web Developer

Adaptive Web Development

I was thinking the same thing. Provide the whole road with internet. Get an adsl line and a 512k wireless internet connection. adsl for local and gaming, wireless for international traffic.

A simple router can do this for you. Charge every R350, that is R3500 for 10 homes.

If you not crossing any roads is this illegal?

..- dot dot dash

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by freeek</i>
<br />I was thinking the same thing. Provide the whole road with internet. Get an adsl line and a 512k wireless internet connection. adsl for local and gaming, wireless for international traffic.

A simple router can do this for you. Charge every R350, that is R3500 for 10 homes.

If you not crossing any roads is this illegal?

..- dot dot dash
<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

NO, read john's posts for full Clarity on this issue, it was also a proposed business plan for me, that wasn't worth the hassles.
Basically, ICASA wouldn't even be bothered by a little network between your neighbors... until they realise theres profit being made, and then they must step in to protect their Big Bro Telko.

That seems to be ICASA's "unofficial" position at the present time. They don't really want anybody using the ISM band at all, since in South Africa it's not an unlicensed band, but is, in some places, almost completely allocated to Telkom and/or Sentech.

Telkom use ISM band radios to relay telephone service to areas where cable theft is frequent, they also seem to have started using the ISM band to operate their own Wi-Fi hot spots.

With the public using the band, Telkom's switch-to-switch wireless relays might pick up interference, on their "licensed" band, which would mean you'll get a huge fine from ICASA and a huge bill from Telkom for "using their frequency."

However, if you are only using a very low power transmitter and are very far from any Telkom equipment, you should be alone on the ISM band in your area. If that is the case, you should be able to get away with using it, provided you stay inside the legal limits for transmission power on unlicensed civilian devices. This means, no amplifiers, no custom antennas, ESPECIALLY not those high-gain and often dangerously high radiation-level Pringles "Cantennas" that so many people like using these days.

According to a source at ICASA, they are only prosecuting people that are advertising Wi-Fi as a service. That means, you may use it inside your home, as you please.

This would mean, you should also be able to use it to connect to others within your neighbourhood, as long as you do not cross any roads. There is one other snag though. You will also need permission from anyone who's property will be traversed by your signals. This means, if neighbour A and C want to connect to each other, but live on opposite sides of neighbour B's house, they will need to ask neighbour B for permission to connect across his property. This was initially intended to limit the laying of cables across property, but is so broadly defined that it covers Wi-Fi connections as well. Neighbour B may even charge rent for your signal passing through his airspace.

On the whole, I would not recommend such a strategy though. ICASA might easily consider it an "advertised, for profit" service, even though you aren't advertising it in the true sence of the word.

The only way you could get away with it is if you carried the entire costs of the ADSL line and provided the access to other users free of charge, or "accidentally," meaning, you set up your wireless access point, but pretend to have no clue how to secure it, so you have no controle over others accessing your network.

If the cost of buying an ADSL line on your own is too high, you might try sharing it with your direct next door neighbour. If each house has a very low power Wi-Fi device to bridge the gap, the signal should reach your neighbour, but it should not be strong enough to attract any attention.

Then simply bill your neighbour for "access to network backup services" once each month. Don't brag about this though, keep it strictly between you and your neighbour. In fact, if your devices support it and you need to have more than one AP to cover the area, try setting the APs up in bridge (WDS) mode and using the same SSID on all APs to make the network appear as a home Wi-Fi network for your own personal use only.

Be warned though, anybody with a Kensington key-chain Wi-Fi finder will easily be able to detect that second AP is not on your property, so make _SURE_ you do not interfere with anybody else's broadcasts, especially Telkom or Sentech, and make sure you use very low power equipment.

Willie Viljoen
Web Developer

Adaptive Web Development

I don't intend on making a profit, but I do intend on getting free internet for myself.

..- dot dot dash

What about running a cable - does the same apply - okay as long as it doesn't cross the road? I was thinking it would be a lower profile to just run a normal UTP network for a couple of houses?

There have been many posts ad nausem over the months on this topic. Please read the forum for all this stuff. On the legality aspect, an ammendment to the Telecoms Act made in recent years has clearly restricted private networks (wired or unwired) to staying within property lines and not crossing public roads. If you were to run a string and two cans between you and your neighbour's properties, you would be technically breaking the law. Pathetic, yes, but the law stands...its government ensuring that Telkom is legislatively protected in every possible means of communications links.

For confirmation on the legislation, direct from ICASA, see the following document, particularly point 3.2.4
http://www.internet.org.za/ICASA_wireless_findings.doc

<font color="blue">Telkom needs a leash, ICASA needs some guts, and the </font id="blue"><font color="red">SA consumer</font id="red"><font color="blue"> needs to make it happen</font id="blue">

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by lewstherin</i>
<br />There have been many posts ad nausem over the months on this topic. Please read the forum for all this stuff. On the legality aspect, an ammendment to the Telecoms Act made in recent years has clearly restricted private networks (wired or unwired) to staying within property lines and not crossing public roads. If you were to run a string and two cans between you and your neighbour's properties, you would be technically breaking the law. Pathetic, yes, but the law stands...its government ensuring that Telkom is legislatively protected in every possible means of communications links.

For confirmation on the legislation, direct from ICASA, see the following document, particularly point 3.2.4
http://www.internet.org.za/ICASA_wireless_findings.doc

<font color="blue">Telkom needs a leash, ICASA needs some guts, and the </font id="blue"><font color="red">SA consumer</font id="red"><font color="blue"> needs to make it happen</font id="blue">
<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">
Lewstherin, I couldn't care less about what the law says. I just wanted to know what one needs, as many of the people in the forums know what they're talking about. There are hundreds of apartment complexes in Cape Town where sharing a big connection (512 in this country seems to qualify as that) is legal within the property lines. I am aware of the legislation and so is everyone else, but so far no one give a shti []

ICASA can spin on a cactus as far as i'm concerned. If Hellkom does anything wrong, they take months and months. If it's a member of the tax and rate-paying public they take immediate action.


<font color="navy"><font size="1"><b>Where others have progress, we have Telkom.</b>
Hellkom website - http://telkomsucks.0catch.com</font id="size1"></font id="navy">

Mad contact Scoop, they the official resellers of all planet stuff.

William is one of the sales ppl there, his pretty good with all networking. They behind sahara in viking park(i think viking park


..- dot dot dash

Try miro. Their just opposite scoop in the same complex. Their stuff is a little cheaper and they always have everything in stock. We've been running a wireless hotspot with a "footprint" of about 6 km radius for a year now... and no one has bothered us yet.

I've been sharing a connection to my next door neighbour for quite a while using the same strategy. Our hotspot has a foot print with a radius of a mere 300 meters around our houses. He lives in a small town house complex bordering our property, with his town house being directly on the other side of the wall separating us and the complex.

We have one AP in his house for serving his laptop and a PC in his garage. The second AP is at my end. We needed two APs because the wireless cards in his house just couldn't get good throughput all the way through the walls, and we didn't want to set up non-standard antennas.

The two APs run in WDS (repeater) mode, which means they both appear to be the same wireless network, even though they can have separate SSIDs, and allow for roaming between the APs with IAAP.

We've never had anybody bother us or ask about it either. We don't really brag about it though.

If anybody should ever come asking, of course, my AP runs in WDS mode, it's just a repeater so that the people living in the town house complex can see each other's computers through the area in the complex which seems to absorb signals for some reason.

"Oh, they can share my internet connection, oh dear, I didn't know that, I thought I had to plug it in to my network for them to be able to see a network sothat their PCs can see each other, I didn't know you had to secure it, are they using my internet, on my computer, I didn't see them work on my computer, have they hacked me?"

*Pretend to be a stock South African home user idiot* [}]

Or, if they get really pushy,

I could show them my blank cheque ICASA license for low power (under 1 mW) transmission on the entire spectrum of the ISM (2.4GHz-2.55GHz) band, with their own un-fakable holographic sticker of authenticity, which came with my (ICASA approved) Siemens DECT phone kit. []

Willie Viljoen
Web Developer

Adaptive Web Development

Yo MaD, I wasn't trying to close your idea down, just thought I'd set the confusion about what qualifies as illegal at rest. As to the wireless networking, most reports I've read about these kinds of networks use the following kind of setup:

Take a 3 user network sharing a single broadband connection (the gateway).
The gateway location needs:
1 x omni-directional antenna - 10dBi gain will very roughly give 1 km radius coverage
1 x wireless AP with removable antenna - Linksys or Orinoco (if you can get them)
1 x outdoor housing for AP (you can use a modded electricity box)
1 x broadband router/1 x linux box running as a router
Ethernet cabling
Power cabling

Mount your antenna as high as possible. Fit the AP into the housing, and mount it as close to the antenna as possible, plugging the antenna feed into the removable slot on the AP. The reason for doing this is that antenna cabling has up to 0.5 dBi signal loss per metre, so the shorter the antenna cabling the better. Omin-drectional antenna also have lower gain, so you want to save as much signal strength as possible. Having the AP right next to the antenna means you get the best strength from the antenna feed. Run ethernet cabling from the AP to your router/linux box. Run the power cabling from your AP to a powerpoint to ensure it has power.

All user locations need:
1 x Wireless network card with removable antenna (Orinoco is the best brand IMHO)
1 x Yagi Directional antenna
Antenna cabling

Mount the Yagi pointing at the location of the omni antenna of the gateway location. Run antenna cabling down to the wireless network card. If you have to run a large length of antenna cabling, then maybe consider rather going the outdoor AP route as I described for the gateway setup.

At this point you should basically have a functional wireless network, and so proceed to share the broadband accordingly.

Hope this helps dewd.

<font color="blue">Telkom needs a leash, ICASA needs some guts, and the </font id="blue"><font color="red">SA consumer</font id="red"><font color="blue"> needs to make it happen</font id="blue">

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by lewstherin</i>
<br />Yo MaD, I wasn't trying to close your idea down, just thought I'd set the confusion about what qualifies as illegal at rest.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">
For sure, thanks boet and thanks for your info above and to all the other as well.. I'm gonna design a A6 flyer (it's only 170 beans for 1,000) & drop them in mailboxes in all the surrounding complexes and see what happens... will definitely use a spare phone with a prepaid number for contact details [][8]

Now the only problems are:
a) MW is only in beta close to my area, and as I've read in the other forums the service is up to shti at the moment
b) DSL isn't an option due to the cap
c) Satellite isn't an option due to the price.

So will have to wait for MW eh, but the current problems are worrying.. All I wanna do is share a connection and divide the costs equally with everyone in the surrounds - if the connection is R1,500 and there are 10 peepz sharing we each pay R150 a month.. I'm not gonna do it for profit. The hardware like antenna etc I'll pay for myself. Ja, no jobs for me at Hellkom i know

Also another prob (maybe?) is that we get quite a bit of fog here in the morning/late evening during winter - won't that stuff up the wireless connections, and what about the MW signal?

<font color="navy"><font size="1"><b>Where others have progress, we have Telkom.</b>
Hellkom website - http://telkomsucks.0catch.com</font id="size1"></font id="navy">

Actually, you'll find the fog won't really make a difference to your wireless signal. Many myths exist surrounding wireless networking and wet weather conditions, they are all myths.

First off, water does not resonate at 2.4GHz, so the signal getting amplified by water as some people believe happens, is mere day dreaming. It probably seems stronger because rain attenuation (I'll explain below) actually reduces stray waves that bounce from neighbouring structures and cause multi-path attenuation.

For more information about microwaves and the resonance frequency of water, see http://www.zaragozawireless.org/zgzwl/wk/index.php/Microondas

Multi-path attenuation:

Multi-path attenuation affects radio signals in all wave lengths. This occurs when signals that have taken different paths through the atmosphere meet at the receiver. If two strong signals arrive completely (180 degrees) out of phase, the signals will cancel each other out and the receiver will see almost no signal at all.

This is usually not a problem as partially out-of-phase signals can be used by digital devices for error correction, instead of disrupting the signal. The likelyhood of seeing a strong signal completely out of phase is also minimal, this would only occur if both terminals are within visual range of a large, unpainted metal object.

Rain attenuation:

Rain attenuation occurs when water in the atmosphere disperses the radio wave. Rain attenuation very rarely cancels out a signal completely. This kind of attenuation increases with the size of water drops and complete cancellation will only occur when the diameter of the body of water is the exact length of the wave. I have yet to see a water drop 12 centimeters across.

Thunder storms accompanied by heavy showers with larger drops can cause mild rain attenuation, but you will find the difference rarely exceeds one dB.

In some cases, people seem to believe that water in the atmosphere increases the strength of the signal. This is not true, but may be observed in densely developed areas.

Many structures of non-uniform shape and size in the area surrounding the transmitter can cause serious multi-path attenuation. Mild rain attenuation helps to weaken the stray waves to such an extent that multi-path attenuation does not occur during heavy rain storms, and the (normally attenuated) signal appears to be stronger.

For a more comprehensive study of the reliability or wireless networking, see http://www.comsearch.com/telecom/full_service-reliability.jsp

As to the MW signal, you might have a much more serious problem there. While MW is not 802.11 wireless networking, but UTMS TDD based, it still uses the 2.4GHz ISM band spectrum.

Sentech and Telkom share a blanket license for the ISM band throughout South Africa, and you can expect to be prosecuted if your network causes any interference with their equipment. Even being visible on the ISM band might be considered interference.

In short, I would not set this up anywhere near any Sentech coverage areas. A large antenna with 10dBi+ gain is guaranteed to attract the attention of Sentech technicians with Wi-Fi finders who happen to be in the area.

If you must set this up, I would recommend an alternative strategy which will cost you more money, but will insure your network remains discreet.

Instead of one access point at a high site, with a large antenna and a large RF foot print, I would suggest you use many small access points with low gain antennas.

The average AP should still give you a 50 - 300 meter radius RF foot print, enough to cover most small town house developments. If wiring all the APs together is an issue, employ a second AP at each location operating in WDS (bridge/repeater mode) with a directional antenna pointed at the nearest next AP.

Make sure your antennae are discretely installed, so as not to attract visual attention, and get an antenna with an extremely tight beam width (no more than 8 degrees) to make sure your strong signal doesn't leak out and get you in trouble.

This will most certainly be much more expensive than one access point with a large, powerful omni-directional antenna, but will be almost invisible to anyone not inside your complex or neighbourhood.

A final point, when installing directional antennae for inter-link or client connection perposes, while you want to keep it discreet, make sure you get it high enough up to clear any living quarters. While signal strength is not an issue here, safety is a concern.

Keep in mind that these are the same microwaves you use to cook food in your microwave oven, all be it at a much lower power level. You do not want to find yourself directly in the way of the beam from a powerful, concentrated, directional microwave antenna for an extended period of time.

As for outside connectivity, you might want to consider the uncapped ADSL offering from DataPro. It's slightly more expensive than the 512kbps offering from Sentech (approx. R2200 per month including line rental), but will give you the relatively better reliability and shorter latency of ADSL, without the problem of the cap to consider.

DataPro also install a firewall/mail server combination on site, which will allow you to provide an almost ISP-like service to your neighbours, mail service and all.

You can find more information at http://www.datapro.co.za/

Willie Viljoen
Web Developer

Adaptive Web Development

Willie, the ISM band at 2.4GHz is designated for industrial, scientific and medical use. For this reason it is unlicensed which means anyone can use the band. Sentech in fact uses the 2.5GHz band for which they have an exclusive license.

Thus, there is no interference between the two very different types of wireless connection. It is perfectly possible and feasible to set up a WLAN in a Sentech coverage area. Sentech will not pick you up on 2.4GHz. They are only monitoring and protecting their frequency band which is 2.506GHz - 2.53GHz. Anyways they only do this if MW users are getting problems due to frequency band hijacking.

But all of this frequency band stuff is actually the responsibility of ICASA and not Sentech/Telkom directly anyways..