Just posted this on the piertopier.net forums in responce to Ian's post, soory its taken so long.
Sounds like what you need is meshap from locustworld! See below for my 5 minute rural broadband how to, feed usees the same measap system we do, everybody does.
QUOTE (has links on our board)
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Just to give you some pointers I've gained, mostly from the locustworld meshap mailinglist.
The (only?) current system of building large disparate wifi networks is meshap, meshap is a Linux Based mesh networking wifi solution. The software's free, and will run on most wifi hardware. Can be downloaded from locustworld. Its not perfect, its not easy to the get the hang of, but it works.
To get it to work, you need. Some locations (line of sight required) some meshboxes, these can be bought or home made running meshap. Some antenna 12db Omnis from solwise are what everyone I know uses.
These aerials and mesh boxes should talk to each other quite happily a couple of miles more if you careful. Most will server clients with normal wifi cards over very impressive distances as well. The antenna not only transmits strongly but "Hears" better as well. So get a few people together who are prepared to have a mesh box in their loft and an antenna on their roof.
A few people with mesh boxes, can serve loads of people with normal wifi cards, and once the mesh is up and running should one fail, or the box be accidentally unplugged the network will build a route around the hole, and pick up any clients another node can see and carry on regardless.
You also need an internet connection; most ISPs won't let you "Share" your broadband, mean I know. Some will if you get enough people then you can buy a big fast business type connection which you can do what you like with. Many rural meshes are going live with aramiska satellite connections, and seem to be keeping the price down to comparable to the wired providers. Meshap can support multiple connections to the internet, so if you have 3 people with broadband connections you mesh boxes will advatise the connection to the mesh boxes which don't have internet connection and the mesh will send to the nearest one. If you have more than one internet connection and one of them goes down the mesh will just use another one till it re-appears. When buying/selling internet bandwidth can be legal challenging, apparently its better to "give the bandwidth" and sell membership to a "club" - don't ask me why.
I have dealt with Solwise, they supply good gear to many locustworld meshap networks, Locustworld's meshap I can also recommend it rocks. Know nothing personally about aramiska, other than people use them. You've already got some people by the sound of it, join the meshap users list, its full of really great helpful people, get a couple of meshboxes running in your lounge (use any old PC and the CD version off the net for your experiments). I really don't know about rural locations, but for an internet connection talk to moving edge they provide ours!
Tom
Posted on May 6, 2004, 5:55 PM from IP address 81.99.212.59