I think the walls in our house have chicken wire in them because it acts like a Faraday cage. WiFi just doesn't penetrate walls. So I use power-over-ethernet to fill every room with wi-fi. I attached a power-over-ethernet unit to my cable internet modem and plugged it into an AC outlet. In the other rooms of the house, I use wi-fi power-over-ethernet adapters. The internet connection travels through the power wiring of the house. It's not as fast as a wired ethernet connection, but it works well for our purposes, including streaming video. Here's a good starter kit on Amazon. Read the rest

It's $35/month for the service, from San Francisco's coolest indie ISP (founded by Rudy Rucker's son, Rudy Jr, it was the inspiration for Pigspleen, the fictional ISP in my novel Little Brother) and if you opt to pay a little extra, they'll install a free link in a low/medium income neighborhood, too. Read the rest