Installation

Well the day arrived and my two brand new Wireless Access points arrived.

I removed my existing 3G router and High Gain Aerial from my house and installed them at the test location up the hill as shown below.


Wireless Access Point Installed up the hill

Because I decided to buy a cheap power inverter the installation of the equipment in the box was straight forward.  The inverter also has a function to cut out when the battery level gets to a certain point so there is less chance of damage to the router and the battery itself.  I configured the wireless access point into Access point mode and set the security settings with an attached laptop in this position up the hill.



3G Router, Power inverter, PoE Injector and 12volt Truck battery in Sealed box.

I then setup the other unit at our house, up a tree that has pretty good line of sight (approx.  750m), although it is looking through tree branches.  I plugged this unit directly into my office Hub and configured it into "Bridge Mode"

Wireless Receiver install up a tree at our house

The next thing to do was to test signal strength of the wireless connection, the 3G signal Connect Strength and obviously the Internet speed gained.  To my relief I had good signal strength between the two wireless units.

The 3G signal was also very good compared to what I had been getting as shown below.  Previously I had on a good day 1 bar strength.

The Internet connection speed itself was outstanding as shown below:

The one unknown now is how long would the batteries last?

Until the next Post....

The Investigation...

After seeing the Telecom XT coverage map in the previous post, i realised that some parts of our farm was supposedly getting limited coverage (areas in pink), and wondered how strong that signal was.

I decided to do some tests with a laptop and a USB 3G data stick to see how good the reception was in those locations.  I tried about 5 different spots and to my surprise I was getting a reasonable signal strength and a download speed of approx 1.5mb/s which was allot better than what I was getting down at our house.  The 3G stick that I had bought to run this experiment with was speed limited so that may have been limiting the possible speed that I was getting.  My existing 3G Wireless router has a top theoretical speed of 21MB/s .

The best spot I found is shown in the picture below and from Google Earth is approx 750m away in a straight line

So now the problem was how to get the signal from this location to my house and how to power it as the closest power to this location was down at the house.

After discussion with a friend he pointed me to this device  Wireless Device

These are a totally sealed device that is made especially for the outdoors and is powered through PoE (power over Ethernet), which means there is only one cable entering the device which is really cool

After reading through the specs which said it had a range of 20 km's (which I didn't really believe) and reading the reviews I thought this could be an option but there was still an issue with supplying power to the unit.  I decided to bite the bullet and order 2 of them. (one for up the hill and one for my house)

I Intended to power the unit up the hill by 12 volt car batteries which I have a few spare floating around, and see how it went.  I didn't know how much power would be drawn from the units so this was a bit of a risk as well as the Wireless range, but was worth a try.

Next Post - The Units arrive :)

The Problem!!!

There are allot of benefits of where I live, wide open spaces, clean air, quiet, mountainous scenery, great change in seasons(hot summer & cold winters as shown in below images).  The downside is our Internet connection here is appalling. 

The options to us for Internet connection is Dial up, and wireless 3G Internet.  We don't have any wired broadband service in our area.  Unfortunately as shown in below picture where our house is we live in the shadow of hills between our house and the 3G Cel phone tower. 







With my current setup of a 3g Router placed in our house connected to a high Gain 3G aerial I manage to get a max download speed of about 256KB's at the best of times.  This service has allot of drop off and it is not unusual to be unconnected for a whole day.

Google Map showing 3G Coverage

Current Speedtest Results

View over looking our farm from our Airstrip

Now you may ask why having bad Internet is to much of a problem.  Well for me it is.  I run an Architectural Design business and Computer Programming Business from home.  My clients for the programming business are mainly overseas especially in Australia and the USA.  These clients which have great Internet connections expect me to be able to connect via Skype etc to discuss, collaborate and demo our projects with them through the Internet.  With a connection like we have got that is impossible.  I have to travel 20kms to the nearest town and setup a computer in a friends house and borrow his Internet connection.  Not really ideal at all.

There must be a better way......  to be continued.

Welcome

Welcome to my small blog.  This blog is going to explain my difficulties with my Internet connection and how I increased the reliability and speed by more than 20 times through the help of a friend on the other side of the world (Thanks Alex).