Suffering for almost 10 years at a max speed of 112K is over!  I’ve been trying to get broadband wireless service from the local provider (Newcastle Broadband) for a couple of years, but depsite repeated surveys and exploring relays and so forth, they were never able to complete a proposal to get service to the house (the barn gets great signal!).

Last fall Coy and I played with some wireless technology ourselves after completing the solar array installation.  At last we found a combination that worked - a 24" dish at home and a cantenna at the barn (two dishes didn’t work well - perhaps because of reflections off of the metal-clad side of the barn?

Then it took a couple of months of phone calls, web requests, and so forth before I reached the company CEO and was able to schedule an installation.  We mounted a 20′ pole to the barn to clear the trees and allow them some more room to grow.

Coming out of the Motorola Canopy reciever, I go directly into a Linksys 54Mb Access Point hooked up to the cantenna.  At home the dish hooks up into another Linksys 11Mb Access Point I’ve had for years.  That one gets set to "Access Point Receiver" mode and the output of that goes inside to my Linksys 54Mb Router/Hub/Access point.

I still have one bit of trouble - though the Canopy has DHCP, and my access points can get an IP address easily, my laptop doesn’t seem to get one very well.  That means I still have to have a router in the mix - which prevents me from getting directly to the Canopy’s web admin console unless I drive up to the barn.

I got one of the cheaper plans - 600Kb down, 300Kb up, but if that isn’t sufficient I can simply phone up and they’ll dial me up to 1.5Mb. 

Five times faster - one third the cost.  I’m a happy camper so far!