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Ask HN: What to do about my parent's Internet?

10 points by coreyp_1 ↗ HN
* My parents live in a rural area (Texas) just outside the city limits of a city of approx 10K people.

* Their current Internet is a line-of-sight service with an antenna on their roof.

* They pay $65/mo. for ~2.15Mbps Down, 2.25Mbps Up (yes, the #'s are right... I just checked using http://speedtest.att.com/speedtest/)

This is horribly slow! It feels like the ISP is price gouging (increasing 1Mbps up costs an extra $20/mo, IIRC)!

Is there a non commercial way to extend a signal from someone in the center of the town to my parents (my sister's house, for example, approx 2 miles)?

This is not my area of expertise, but I figured that it was worth asking the wisdom of HN for potential ideas/solutions.

[EDIT: fixed newlines for proper paragraph separation]

14 comments

[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 21.6 ms ] thread
matt_the_bass
If you have line of site to your sisters house, there are relatively inexpensive technical solution. However to do it leagally, there maybe signifiant municipal regulations that need to be mitigated. Also, most residential broad band contract prohibit sharing of service in that way. You may need to create your own isp. Not impossible but maybe not worth the headache.

Do your parents have cell phone coverage? If so, that might be simpler.

walshemj
Is that just they ban sharing your credentials with the neighbours.

If you could set up a ptp link (id say Omni on sisters house and a directional one at the parents) as a bridge from parents to sisters house. 2Km with LOS is trivial to achieve.

As your effectively bridging the two houses any host in the parents house would be part of the same network and be seen as such.

As in the US the phone company's responsibility ends at the demarc trying to stop how your internal wiring is configured seems impossible:-)

coreyp_1
There's a tall hill between them, so I'll have to check to see if LOS can be established.
walshemj
Ah might be an issue then as would any trees in the way.
coreyp_1
They do have cell coverage, but it's trivial to blow through the data caps ("unlimited" is a lie... they throttle you significantly).

Even if my parents got rid of their $120/mo satellite tv package, they couldn't replace it with a streaming service because of the data costs.

amigoingtodie
Check out 4gantennashop.com.

They offer decent rates for rural LTE with fairly large caps.

f2n
>most residential broad band contract prohibit sharing of service in that way

Or just ignore that and don't tell them. as long as you're not doing this as a business or at large scale I couldn't possibly imagine they would notice.

wmf
Check out Verizon or AT&T fixed wireless; it's basically a LTE router with a large antenna on the outside of the house.
coreyp_1
Thanks! I didn't know about these services, but I just checked, and AT&T doesn't provide service here, and I couldn't find anything about Verizon offering service (or not) in my area. I may just walk into a store and ask.
wmf
If you can't get official fixed wireless, you can also install your own LTE router with an external antenna (assuming you have any bars at that location to begin with).
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nikcub
I've seen a lot of people do this with wireless bridges from Ubiquiti. You can extend networks over 20km if you have line of sight - lots of examples of it in Australia[0]

You want two of these[1] or two of these[2] - you need line of sight which might involve raising the antennas high enough

If you search around for wireless bridge or similar terms you'l find many people who have posted their solutions to similar problems such as this one[3]

As always check your local regulations - but as these products use public spectrum you should be fine, it's usually a question of what you can mount on the homes, how high and where

[0] http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/2605492

[1] https://store.ubnt.com/products/nanolocom5

[2] https://store.ubnt.com/products/powerbeam-m2-400mm-us

[3] https://www.telcoantennas.com.au/site/how-extend-wifi-covera...

coreyp_1
thanks for the info & links!
scalaris373
Hi,

I've been using a 3 Km wireless link as my only connection to the outside world (through my parents's house) for a couple of years, with great results.

We use a couple of Ubiquiti Nanobeam M5 (though you might want to look at the newer Nanobeam AC now). I'm very impressed with the quality, performance and reliability of such cheap hardware.

You DO need Line of Sight, though.

https://www.ubnt.com/airmax/nanobeamm/