[Nick Fury]

I think some of this wireless myth and lore should be cleared up as there seems to be much of it in this thread. Where to start:

802.11g does not go further in distance than 802.11b. It all depends on the Amps and Antennas you have connected, nothing to do with the ethernet spec.

802.11b is not cheaper than 802.11g. Seriously, I have heard this one before and it in all honestly just depends on what you buy and where you buy it.

802.11b hardware DOES work with new 802.11g hardware because 802.11g is backwards compatible, I'm not sure what the problems you had were but it wasn't because the access point was 802.11g and you had an 802.11b card.

Now back to the subject at hand. Aside from calling your cable company (which is the easy way out and is what you should do). If you wanted to set up a wireless access point at the end of your driveway and run it to your house it wouldn't be all that hard. The first thing you need to get is a cable/DSL modem. After that you need an access point of some kind on the driveway end. If you can find an older access point that was made to use with the prism2 chipset PCMCIA cards then I suggest you get it (yeah it's only 802.11b but since when does a cable/DSL connection get more than 11mbs?) then I reccomend you pick yourself up some 200mW Senaeo Engenius cards (probably two of them). Now for power, you don't need 120vac.. what you need is the combined DC voltage of the modem and the access point.. this can be done in many ways (to name two: solar and power of ethernet). You are also going to need some sort of directional antenna, a good cantenna will work excellently. Now you are done on the driveway side of things. Next up you need something to recieve the signal and split it off to your various computers but this is why you bought the other wireless card. (also probably going to need a PCMCIA to PCI adapter) I reccomend a pentium 2 machine as a router.. add about 512 of RAM and you are set. Use a crappy HD and set up a small router linux distro on it. Throw in another ethernet card and run it out to a switch/hub and you are done. Now plug the rest of the machines in.

Now if this sounds like an absurd amount of work, well it is. I have done similar setups before and they aren't much fun to trouble shoot but it does make you feel good to put something like this together. Anyway, I reccomend calling the cable company, it's a lot less headbanging and frustration.

BTW the total cost for all of this crap would be around 200 bucks... not bad I say.