Wireless Service for a small town

[Byron Sonne]

> 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

If it were me in this position, I would indeed have a good tower & 
antenna setup on my building. I would complement that, however, with 
similar setups (not many, 3-5 more) at other geographically dispersed 
locations within the town.

These 'collector' points would service a geogrpahically appropriate 
subset of the town and act as uplinks to your 'master' location, as well 
as being able to route to the other corresponding locations. Spread 
around the bandwidth a little too. You'd wind up with a simple mesh 
topology, some measure of redundancy, and you wouldn't need as much RF 
power nor as large antennas. And antennas can get expensive, believe me. 
With 802.11a/b/g though you can make alot of your own antennas or mod 
those digital satellite dishes, dump the LNBs, drop in a Pringles 
cantenna and *presto* get nearly 40km line of site links. But install 
and aim your antennas in the spring when the trees have grown! Like this 
one site I came across says, if you aim in winter and get excellent 
links, they'll go to shit once trees that are in the way start growing 
leaves again.

Another advantage is that as the town grows, you could 'upscale' some of 
these 'collector' points to act as redundant paths to the internet if 
other methods of connectivity are implemented nearby. Also if the towns 
develop you can expand the mesh more easily instead of having to up the 
RF power/sensitivity of the 'master' site and/or adding more antennas.

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