Wireless Service for a small town

[Sidney Shapiro]

Hi all. I currently run a server farm in a small Northern Ontario town.
I have been approached by the town and asked if I could offer high speed
(or higher than dialup) to the 4,000 or so people who live in the town,
an area of about 5km. My building is located near the center of the
town, and does not have direct line of site to a lot of the town, yet
there are no major structural impedances. Does anyone have an idea of
how I could get this working? From what I assume, I could put up an
extra server to act as a gateway to my switches and from there to the
routers. On the other end of the server, I would run an antenna on the
roof from a wireless router type box. (I have been looking at the D-Link
ANT24-1801 Yagi antenna for a base or the SMC SMCANT-DI105 10.5 dBi
Antenna or the SMCANT-DI145 High Gain 14.5 dBi Antenna - which they
claim can reach 9 miles without LOS) Once the main base is set up with
enough power, I would like to be able to install a smaller wireless
antenna attached to a router in the persons office/home. I am looking to
do a dry run with about 50 antennas and routers, and expand from there.
Any suggestions regarding the backend of the service to control access
and services? Any alt hardware? Is there a P2P solution for this which
would allow users to boost each others signals?

As always, any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Sid


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