Ask HN: How can we get better internet?

I'm a undergrad CS student in the middle of nowhere, East TX. I'm here for a little-known but awesome CS program.

Unfortunately, internet access here is pretty awful. I live in an old (50 years?) dormitory. IT bills us about $1.50/GB, and it's filtered like you wouldn't believe (packet inspection, no bittorrent, VPNs, lots of spurious firewalling...). Unfortunately, moving not an option, and IT is deaf to student concerns.

Along with several other angry CS majors, I've been paying Clearwire (pre-Wimax ISP, claims 1.5mbit) about $40/month, but lately they've been getting on our case for "over-usage" and are threatening to cut us off. We're talking about 2-3GB/week of traffic. They do some light packet shaping as well, so we're looking for something better.

I'm only about 600-700ft from the nearest neighborhood, so there's some talk of paying someone to get a fat pipe and figuring out how to microwave it to where I live. I don't know enough about the equipment I'd need, or what would fit in the budget (Motorola stuff looks expensive!). Administration takes a very dim view of this sort of thing, so the equipment on my end would have to be indoor. Any recommendations?

AFAIK, the buildings are too old to be wired properly for DSL/Cable (or not worth Ma Bell's effort). Satellite requires an external mount, which is a no-no.

Can any clever hackers out there think of something we missed?

5 comments

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wmf 17y ago ↗

Sounds like a pretty bad situation. Look at http://www.ubnt.com/ if you want dirt-cheap long-range wifi.

drewcrawford 17y ago ↗

What kind of antennas would I need to make something like this work?

Most of the radios have built-in antennas.

chronomex 17y ago ↗

UBNT, as another poster mentioned, makes some good wifi products. I know someone who's used a pair of Nanostations ( http://metrix.net/ubiquiti-nanostation-2-p-110.html ) to do about five miles, crossing a bay beach-to-beach. I'm sure that a mile won't be a great problem for these units. I've got one myself, they're quite worth it.

I'm sure you can figure out some sort of mount that'll fit, for example using some double-sided tape on the inside of a window.

Thanks for pointing me to UBNT. Looks like their wifi-range products are dirt cheap, but that frequency hinges so much on LOS that I don't think it can go the distance. I've got some 250mW 2.4GHZ test hardware that I set up, and it can do 300+yds with LOS but not 20m through the building.