Secure WiFi from 1 miles away?

June 24, 2004 2:02 PM

Wifi networking question. My brother lives 1 mile away, nearly direct line of sight as I am up on a hill. I can get DSL, but his house cannot. Is there a cheap-ish way to get hi-speed into my house and create a secure wifi network to span to his house as well? (MI)
posted by BrodieShadeTree to Computers & Internet (12 answers total)

Your brother can aim a powerful directional antenna at your access point. Security is all in the access point. Use its encryption feature.
posted by scarabic at 2:05 PM on June 24, 2004

Response by poster: Specifically I would like to watch his PC recorded Conan reruns and he would like fast surfing. Can this be done? Any indication as to broadcasting wifi 1+ mile and securing the network or other hints would be greatly appreciated. To review. 2 houses. 2 pc's. 1 mile apart. wifi?
posted by BrodieShadeTree at 2:06 PM on June 24, 2004

If it's line of sight then you should be fine with the Pringles Yagi antenna scarabic linked to.
posted by linux at 2:21 PM on June 24, 2004

Pringles can antennas can be tricky - you're better off buying a properly calibrated commercial antenna. If you put one on your base station and another at your bro's house you should be able to get some pretty impressive range. Provided they're lined up properly.
posted by aladfar at 2:25 PM on June 24, 2004

Wifi would be fine using a directional antenna. Might not be astoundingly fast, but it'd be at least as fast as your DSL modem.

If you each have multiple computers, you can use access points in Bridge configuration to span the distance.
posted by SpecialK at 2:30 PM on June 24, 2004

Use some sort of secure tunnel, like VPN. Don't rely on plain old WEP, which can be easily broken.
posted by thebabelfish at 2:33 PM on June 24, 2004

I think the Chinese Cookware Antenna has been found to be superior to the Pringles Antenna.
posted by falconred at 3:48 PM on June 24, 2004

WPA is more secure than WEP (which isn't really that bad, either) and is available on many wifi rigs now.
posted by adamrice at 4:12 PM on June 24, 2004

WEP will prevent most uninvited users, but if someone wanted, it doesn't take that long to collect enough packets to crack.
posted by thebabelfish at 5:09 PM on June 24, 2004

Yeah but he'd look kind of suspicious sitting in the open field between the two houses with a laptop and requisite evil hacker hat, now, wouldn't he?
posted by Space Coyote at 8:27 PM on June 24, 2004

See the previous thread on sharing wifi. I'd love to hear what you try and how it works.
posted by theora55 at 9:01 PM on June 24, 2004

You know what would be cool and secure, frikkin' network lasers, probably too expensive though.
posted by milovoo at 11:49 AM on June 25, 2004