I'd like to set up a Campus wide WiFi network here at work. Right now we probably have about 10 or 15 wireless access points in 5 different buildings, but I'd like to change to something more robust. Ideally we would have a massive powered tower in the middle of campus (preferably on the roof) that has a radius big enough to cover the whole campus. We may have to put repeaters on other roofs to bring the signal back inside since we have metal roofs, but I'm getting to the point that our wireless access points are starting to overlap with each other enough to cause issues if we start putting any more in. We've also got a couple of buildings that don't have access to the wifi network (because our wifi is separate from our hardwired network, they are on two different zones in our router and on two different ports as well, which makes me more comfortable security wise) Instead of digging up the ground and running some extra fiber, I thought it would be cool just to broadcast massively. Any tips or ideas? I really want to take our wireless to the next level and don't want to apply a duct-tape solution.
you're looking at it the wrong way - one big tower isn't the way to go because of how wireless works. For a start whilst you might be able to output enough power on an omnidirectional antennae to cover the whole campus chances are you wouldn't be able to get the sensitivity up high enough to pick up signals from the standard power cards in devices. Plus linking buildings with wireless is going to seriously limit your bandwidth. Remember wireless networking is a shared medium so more clients per AP means less bandwidth per client. Ideally you'll want to push the density of access points upwards within the builds and fit some exterior APs to cover outdoor zones where you want coverage. For the inter-building links if you really don't want to lay fiber then use Free-space optics to provide the bandwidth. With the volume of APs you're going to have in such a solution you probably want to look at a centrally managed system using lightweight APs like 3Coms transcend, Ciscos Airespace or the HP radio ports. J
yeah, looking at big commercial wifi setups, pretty much all of them do it by multiple ap's instead of one large tower using a ridiculous wattage
the Cisco aironets are great for this, the 1200s are fully manageable, run the Cisco IOS,really quite secure, and have a lot of nice features that you would want (+a really long range)
At school, we have standard APs all over the place. I couldn't tell you which brand, but it's not uncommon to see a dozen access points from any given location (half of which are the school network, the other half being an open, the only difference being that bit-torrent doesn't seem to work properly on the closed one). Like others have said, I don't think a mega-AP would be the best choice.
I'd also put in a radius authentication server... Make students log on with their student number and campus password, for increased security. Also, more AP's is better then bigger ones, due to all the reasons allready noted
