My best memory of college

Getting fast internet at my apartment

A video tonight reminded me of one of my favorite memories. In senior year of college, I moved into an apartment with two classmates that had a direct line of sight to campus about a quarter of a mile away. Rather than pay for internet, I had a better idea. I took a Linksys 54G router, installed some custom firmware, and got to work. Rather than use it to broadcast WiFi in the house, I attached a 25ft long 1" thick coaxial cable to one of its antenna connections, drilled a hole in the exterior of the house, and fed the cable outside to a 12" Yagi antenna that I had installed on our balcony. I pointed the antenna at a another WiFi access point that I had seen in the corner of the nearest classroom on campus. It took some tweaking over a weekend, but soon, we had 200mbit internet up/down for our apartment back in 2003-2004, which was absolutely unheard of when Cable was offering only 5mbit down. People would come over to our house just to use our internet.

Those were good days.