WiFi

Vauxhall Road Connection

We (Milan and Aran) have a wireless connection between our flats which are about 250m apart. We used ESR1221 200mW access points, 14dBi backfire antennas and 5m low-loss coax cable on each end and configured them as a Wireless Distribution System which allows them to connect to form a single local network. We don't have perfect line of site as there is a couple of brick walls and tree foliage the signal needs to pass through, but our hardware seems to connect quite well regardless - apparently it should connect over 2km line of sight, or 5km with the 600mW access points.

Performance

The connection is very robust having no outages at all. The transfer rate however is quite low at around 1.5Mbps (the XNet speed test says 2.3mbps down and 780Kbps up), but is reliable enough that long file transfers of many hours are fine. The connection continues to work reliably in heavy rain with a good response time, but the transfer rate drops down to less than 200Kbps.

Issues

The network access from my end (Aran, the remote end) failed today (01:17, 18 April 2009 (UTC)) and it turned out to be due to Milan initiating a large file transfer from his computer onto the NAS. This was the case even though the access point, computer and NAS in question were all connected to a switch not a hub. Milan solved this by upgrading it to a gigabit switch, but this would need to be solved a better way if we had a lot of gigabit LAN activity.

See also

• WiFi Antennas
• WiFi products
• www.wikarekare.org - Karekare wifi network