Wok-fi - anyone done it?

[Dave S]

Hey Bar,

Been a while!  I'm now living in Wales (as of a month ago), and have a bit of 
a networking problem I'm trying to work out a solution to.

My studio is now in a barn (dry, but not warm!) which is 60m from the house.  
I could really do with getting "the internet" out to the studio, since it's 
also where I'm going to be doing my website work.

Wireless is good here - no neighbours, so no interference.  However, the 
wireless signal does not reach the barn - although I didn't really expect it 
to, so no surprises there.

I originally thought I'd just buy a 100m reel of shielded Cat5e cable and run 
it outdoors to the barn.  I think this would cost about £50 or so, which is 
affordable, but would be good to avoid as we're still pretty broke from moving 
house.  It would also leave me with quite a bit of left over cable, but it 
doesn't particularly seem possible to buy lengths of network cable like say 
70m - seems I have to go for the full 100m reel.

Another option I'd heard of but not seriously considered until today is
"wok-fi", aka. using cheap asian cooking implements to make a parabolic 
booster dish for wifi signals.  See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WokFi

The line of sight between house and barn is reasonably clear, and I could 
position the hardware so it was almost totally clear - I think.

Has anyone done this wok-fi stuff?  Does it work well?  Should I just go for 
the network cable?  Any other suggestions?

I'd also considered the mains cable ethernet route (eg. Netgear "Powerline" 
stuff) but although the barn ultimately runs off the same mains supply as the 
house, I think it's coming off it's own (long-ish) spur, rather than an 
extension to the ring main, so I'm not sure how well it would work.  I'd 
borrow someone else's to test with first, but I don't know anyone who has it.

Cheers,

~Dave