Large Wireless Network Advice

[Viterix777]

My friend is a landlord at a apartment building and I agreed to help him setup a wireless network that can provide wireless access to his tenants. The building is fairly big 158 unit 5-story apartment building. The building is 5 stories and was built around 1950 so concrete floors and metal lath and plaster walls, fairly heavy construction so I needed to put a wireless network together that could penetrate all that crap.

My initial idea was to pick up a Trendnet TEW-310APBX access point that allowed for ap to ap connectivety which would allow for a large number of logins. I was also thinking of attaching atleast a 12 dbi gain antenna to each AP and having two AP's saturate the entire complex. If anyone has any better thoughts on how to do this or any better equipment to use, it would be most appreciated.

Thanks All...

 

[Kaiynne]

My best soultion would be to get an 8 or 16 port switch a router, and 5 or 6 APs prefferably with detachable antenna sockets, you will also need 5 high gain omni directional antennas.

You will obviously need to test the signal strength on each floor, but more than likely you will be able to get away with one AP per floor.

Now here is the part where you might think this design is stupid. You have to hard wire all of the APs into the router which will probably be in the basement or something. The reason for this is that using a combined client bridge AP to connect back to the router will destroy your bandwidth. You have about 32 units per floor, which while not the theoretical limit on connections to a single AP is pretty much the practical limit (in some cases cough cough netgear and d-link this is also the theoretical limit for their hardware) so you have to hard wire the APs into the router. That way all 11Mbs are available for your clients to use and the connection between the router and AP will not be your bottleneck.

The fun thing with wireless is that in order to make the connection transparent for the client you have to do a lot of wiring. If the reason your friend is thinking of going wireless is to minimise wiring then wireless will not be a great solution for them. Because there just isn't enough bandwith to host 32 clients and talk to the router, and there cetainly isn't enough bandwidth for the router to talk to 6 bridges simultaneously.

The beauty wireless is on the client side and trust me if you get this to work well the tenants will love you. There is nothing better than a well designed wireless network in terms of client satisfaction.

 

[dougtran]

My main concern would be the interference (reduce signal) from the walls even using ext. attennas. I can barely step out into the hall of my small condo because of this problem (and my AP is in my condo).

You should do a prototype on one floor to see if you will have enough signal strength.

You might want to consider using a Power-Line option if you still want to shy away from hard-wiring. Of course, I have no experience with this new tech🙂

 

[Viterix777]

Originally posted by: dougtran
My main concern would be the interference (reduce signal) from the walls even using ext. attennas. I can barely step out into the hall of my small condo because of this problem (and my AP is in my condo).

You should do a prototype on one floor to see if you will have enough signal strength.

You might want to consider using a Power-Line option if you still want to shy away from hard-wiring. Of course, I have no experience with this new tech🙂

I'm hoping that that I'll fix the reduction in signal problem by placing high gain antennas maybe even several access points with antennas throughout the floors. BUt you're right I do have to do some signal testing to really see. I just wanted to see if anyone out there has experience with a sure fire way to do something like this completelely wireless or atleast with the use of as minimal wires as possible.

thanks for the tips though guys... much appreciated.

 

[DaRana1]

Kaiynne's right, you need to home-run all of the APs back to the core switch, or all the APs on a floor should home-run to a floor-switch, all of which go back to the core switch in the basement wiring closet w/ your Internet pipe out.

It still might be less wiring than putting a jack or more in every apartment, if a single AP can cover multiple apartments.

Oh, for signal testing check out http://www.netstumbler.com It has signal to noise ratio displayed on a nice easy graph. I think it might still require an Orinoco GOLD wireless adapter, though.

 

[Peter]

Use a wired backbone net through the stories, and then add as many wireless access points in each story as you need. Initially use APs w/ wired-net switch inside, so you can add more (switchless) APs on the same story as needed.

Remember, wireless network is for the user's commodity, not the implementor's 🙂