“Where are you, Stepan?” Or how do Wi-fi bridges help save on the Internet

A week ago, he received a second degree, a diploma was on the topic of minimizing the costs of an enterprise. Including minimization of costs for Internet service provider. As a result, I obtained a discount for my company on the grounds that “individuals receive the same service for several times less money, that we have been working for a long time, that they are trouble free, and we don’t eat traffic at all at night”. But, you know, the savings in the end is not particularly noticeable.

And then I remembered one story. When we just drove into a new office, a resident of the house opposite suggested that we connect to his wi-fi access point for a small fee. Fortunately, the house is 30 meters away and the windows of the office are facing it. It was 5 years ago. I dug Habr for a possible solution and found a couple of posts about wi-fi bridges (“That's it!” - I thought):

http://habrahabr.ru/post/193202/
http://habrahabr.ru/post/206282/

What we get: distance to 25-30 km and an acceptable speed. In order for our task to be solved, we need a person who lives not far (up to 25 km) and who does not mind sharing the Internet, for example, for the fact that we will pay him access. This is a real savings for companies. From the point of view of legality, we do not violate anything .
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The technology is simple, but to find someone who would like to share the Internet is the most difficult thing to do. And even more difficult - to find a way to unite such people. But, as we know, “miracles still happen”: I almost immediately found a sentimental story about a poor person offended by the provider and a “adequate dude Stepan”.

The text of the story (taken from the site , which was created to help some find others):

We, like many, suffered from a monopolist provider and had to pay 15,000 rubles for the Internet in the office. The Internet was slow, limited by traffic, besides with high fees for traffic overrun!

We tried Yota, SIM cards of mobile operators and other devices - unfortunately, the speed was not enough. And then the idea came to set up a wi-fi bridge with the nearest residential building. It turned out that in the house, which is 150 meters away from us, unlimited internet at a speed of 80 MBt from a local provider costs 800 rubles per month! This is with a digital television package. The wi-fi bridge itself for this distance together with the installation was found for 12,000 rubles. The benefit was obvious.

The biggest problem was to find a tenant who agreed to rent out 5 square centimeters of his window sill for free, unlimited Internet and television. It took a month and a half to solve this problem. Announcements at the entrances did not last long; there were no contacts of tenants on the Internet by itself. The situation was complicated by the fact that we needed an apartment with windows in our direction and not below the 6th floor, since wi-fi bridge requires direct visibility.

The first walk through the apartments gave 2 threats to call the police, 7 refusals, and the second - helped us find an adequate Stepan, who happily agreed to the proposed conditions and a couple of days later we enjoyed the lightning-fast Internet. And Stepan, in addition to high-speed Internet, is also digital television.

The situation was overshadowed only by the fact that sometimes the router in Stepa’s apartment hung up and had to call him with a request to restart. However, we recently bought him a socket with a GSM module and now the router restart is solved by calling a certain number.
PS The wi-fi bridge tuning wizard said that theoretically we can distribute the Internet to all neighbors in the territory and with such a pipe we won’t even notice a drop in speed. Need to think…

Familiar, right?

Let me advertise a bit: the site is a convenient landing page with a full description of how and what works, what equipment you need, how to contact those who share / use. In essence, this is a social network.

There are few users, but this seems to be due to the fact that the resource was launched quite recently.

In my opinion, a tasty idea and a good implementation. Along the way, I'm trying to get comments from the owners.