Best method of providing Wifi access in my neigbourhood?

Hi, Im moving to a new house this weekend which Iv been sizing up for some time as a place I'd like to deploy a private Wifi network where I could on-sell bandwidth on the sly to my neigbours.

The arrangment of houses, has me sitting at the top with clear & near access to the rooves and windows of my neigbours.

The houses are built on a slope and are spaced about 10 meters apart - ideally elevated and spaced for coverage.

Id have 2, 2meg DSL lines running into my house connected to a 3com 802.11g router (and whatever else I decide to use routing-wise).
The house immediately in front of me would have an OEM accesspoint and directly in front of that house another 802.11g router.

My idea is that all houses surrounding any of these 3 houses would be able to use my network (the housing estate has about 80 houses in total)

I have tested between the 2 neigbournig houses and from the living rooms of each I can maintain a connection with a consistant 1-4ms latency.

My questions are.

What can I do to increase the signal individually for each client so they have more freedom to move within their house?

What can I do to increase the coverage so that at least 40 or so properties could reach my lan?

I want the cheapest options available, ie no 8 fencing wire type suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks!

Do you have an all-you-can eat DSL link? Otherwise you are going to need to watch out for p2p and pr0n hogs. They could soak up your link easily.

Good idea, however you will need to consider;
- how to allocate and manage bandwidth and total usage to each client
- how to bill each client based on their usage, otherwise you will get the hogs
- how to solve the hidden node problem which will cripple a network with more than 5 or 6 clients connected

All the answers are on the internet, happy researching :wink:

Good starting point http://www.wafreenet.org/

Yeh, I dont have a problem with that stuff - thats easy, my questions wasn't "How do I start my own ISP?"


My questions were relating to

What can I do to increase the signal individually for each client so they have more freedom to move within their house?

What can I do to increase the coverage so that at least 40 or so properties could reach my lan?

Iv seen something about 802.11n
Is that what I'm after or??

Using a high-gain omni antenna on your access-point would be my suggestion, see http://shop.borg.co.nz/product_info.php?cP...&products_id=87
but if the AP is more than a few metres away from the antenna (on the roof) then you would probably need to mount the AP close to the antenna and run power and ethernet cables to it.

If you have an easy way of handling the management of the bandwidth that's great. AFAIK the hidden-node problem is still going to be that, a problem, the WAFreenet solution, Frottle, only runs on linux (last I knew) - so if there is some other windows solution readilly available I be keen to hear of it.

Well I wouldnt use windows, linux is the only way of deliverying internet imho.

Im reasonably inexperienced when it comes to 802.11 though