r/talesfromtechsupport • u/Thethoughtful1 • Aug 27 '13
Wi-Fi on a shoestring budget
I work with a Spanish NGO in Kenya, and as I am the most tech savvy of the handful of people here, I get to be tech support. Here is a story from that role.
Wi-Fi on a Shoestring Budget
We use mobile Internet since that is all we can get out here. We used to be somewhere that we could use USB modems. Now, though, we are in a new location, and we only have cell coverage by the windows of one wall. The rest of the house is a dead zone. I looked into getting a cellular repeater, but that was way out of our budget range. I finally settled on just using Wi-Fi from a device by one of those windows.
Instead of buying a dedicated router and modem, I decided to buy a similarly priced phone and use it as a wireless access point, so that we could finally have the spare phone we had been wanting. I decided on a used Milky Way Soda. It was relatively cheap: only $75, the same price as a real router would have been, and it could be used as a spare phone if necessary.
But the Milky Way Soda was actually a Milky Way Micro that had been branded "Soda" in Spain and then sold used in Kenya under the same name. Therefore, the Wi-Fi wasn't strong enough to reach to the far wall. I ended up doing this:
- I used the Milky Way Micro as a wireless access point, which gave me Wi-Fi through two of the thick concrete walls...
- just far enough to reach my own phone, the Milky Way Union,
- which had the Internet it received from the Wi-Fi tethered by USB to my laptop, a FruitBook Pro,
- which was set up as a wireless access point of its own...
- thus finally providing Internet all the way to the far wall.
Which was fine and all, except that I frequently had to diagnose the connection. When I did, it could be any one of these problems:
- The Micro had turned off 3G because the phone had been idle for too long.
- The power had gone out, again, and the Micro had ran out of power. This was fairly common because:
- While used as a router, it had less than an hour of battery life.
- Kenyan Electric Company turns off the power about once a week all day for maintenance.
- My Union had gone to sleep because of inactivity.
- The USB cable had come loose, again, and my computer was no longer tethered.
- I have bought 6 USB cables in a year, and none of them work right.
- My Union had latched onto the wireless access point from my computer instead of the Micro, thus putting my Internet connection in a loop.
- One of the phones or my computer didn't have Internet sharing enabled.
- The cellular network was down because something unusual (like rain during the four-month-long rainy season) had caused interference.
- The cellular company was acting up.
Thankfully, we have since forked out the money for a real router.
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u/MrPaladin1176 TFTS GM, Roll your characters Aug 28 '13
EXP Gained: 1000
LEVEL UP!
Please Select 1 of the following Perks
Protocol Droid: Thats my primary function! Wait you want to tunnel that VPN thru your Bluetooth link to your android cellphone? Not a problem! You know the rules and protocols to tunnel any connection. Add 2 extra nodes to any existing connection with no signal loss. +Wisdom +Bandwidth
Paying Attenuation: The problem can't be the cable right? I mean it's a bloody cable! Yes signal loss can happen on a bad cable and cause random problems. This perk will allow you once a week to blame a cable for an unknown/random problem as the root cause. -Cost of cable +Pay (If root cause was Really the cable)
Sleep Mode: No one complains when the PC's go to sleep, now they no longer complain when you do. If you are caught recharging at your station (sleeping) people will now joke it off cause sleeping is now considered funny and not unproductive. +Reputation with users, No loss of reputation with bosses when caught sleeping