sharing internet between neighbours

[bakaris]

Hi,

I'm having some difficulty sharing my internet connection with my neighbour. There's a lot of interference in our neighbourhood and his connection flickers and drops all the time. To remedy the situation i've been told that he should find a card with a higher mW rating, as it'll pick up signal better than most. An SMC card would be ideal. Or, a second option proposed, was that he should get a wireless access point and tag it onto my network. It'd act like a repeater and the connection wouldn't drop.

now allow me to expose my inexpertise. my neighbour has an airport base station lying around his place. i'm broadcasting with a linksys router. does his base station qualify as a wireless access point? if so, how do i tag his base station to my router? i tried, but couldn't figure it out. Furthermore, we don't really want to share our files with each other, but we would like to share them within our respective houses. is that possible with the hardware we have?

thanks for any help.

[EricB]

The best solution is an wireless extender. A device that will increase the length of the signal (so to speak). The main problem with these devices is, that it will mainly work with the same brands. Especially when working on the 54mbps or 11g standard. An access point might also be a solution.

You will though, only benefit from these devices if the other parts in your network also function on the same standard. Otherwise, it will go back to the weakest link, namely the 11b device somewhere. It's not possible to mix the two standards. There are even extenders and ap's that won't even work in a mixed network of 11b and 11g.

I don't know how that will work with an airport station and how to configure it. It seems in my view, that it's just another ap that can be connected to.

Sharing of files shouldn't be a problem. You can either control access by protecting it by a password. (which can be set in configuring the filesharing) Furthermore, you can apply encryption on your network. Note that this will lead to a much slower performance. Especially when you're looking at 128bit encryption.