[wplug] Wi-Fi

[Michael Skowvron]

dk at curlynoodle.com wrote:
> Yes, I would be starting out very small.  My budget at the moment 
> consists of $100 for an AP or two.

I resell my Covad SDSL line to my neighbors. It's purely a cost-relief 
model and not designed to be profitable. It's about $300/month for the 
line and I charge my 9 neighbors $25/month. I have one person doing a 
co-lo for small amount and I pay the rest.

We live VERY close together in a small courtyard of townhomes and I 
still need 2 APs and $250 worth of antennas mounted outside to provide 
decent signal. I still need to re-engineer the system to use WDS because 
of weak signal at one end of the courtyard, so I'll have to buy some new 
equipment. I hate going to new gear. You just never know what the MTBF 
is going to be.

As small as this is, it's still work to maintain. People expect good 
reliability and that means not skimping on the gear. It really sucks to 
go out of town for work and have an AP go offline leaving half your 
cusotmers with no connection for days until you get back.

I'm lucky, though. I know all of my customers really well because we 
live so close. I don't have to worry about spammers or anyone doing 
anything "shady." I do NAT and no one minds not having a public IP. 
Also, no one runs peer-to-peer applications, so there's never a shortage 
of bandwidth.

In summary, a small setup like this can work. It can still take a lot of 
work to setup and you've got to be a really good sysadmin/netadmin. 
Otherwise I think you'll end up with an unreliable network and unhappy 
neighbors. If you've got the time and skills, it can work really well.

Michael