Help needed regarding Wireless Network at a Motel

Mr Jeff, Thank you for your reply. The building that I am looking to network wirelessly has about 10 rooms on each floor ( 3 floors) and each room is about 8X12. It is a motel, so there are 30 rooms on one side and 30 on the opposite. I have quite a bit of experience in networking(wired and somewhat wireless at an enterpeise level). Getting a Cisco 1200 AP would be something that the client can not afford. This is my first go at doing this kind of work on my own. My main concerns are as follwing:

1) what AP woud be appropriate to use in such an enviroment. I am thinking of getting a Linksys WAP54GPE and doing a site survey at the site to get a good idea regarding coverage. Is this AP appropriagte ?

2) I am going to use PoE switch to provide power to these APs and also I got to make sure that the channels are used appropriatly ( we have 3 channels in 802.11b and g).

3) About authentication and access to network. What option are available to provide access to guests at the motel? I have used wireless networks at hotels where the front desk provides me with access and the router has redirection to hotels main page acking for access. How do I accomplish this ? THis is differnet from enterprise enviroment of having tacacas+ or radius deployments. I would really apprieciate your advise in this matter. Sincerely. A
Reply to
amaar2003
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snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com hath wroth:

Your welcome. Next time, please reply to the original thread. Also, I asked some rather specific questions (mostly details) most of which you've ignored.

Ok. It's long and narrow. Any particular constuction? If concete and steel, you're going to have problems going through the walls. You're not going to be able to do this by "illuminating" the rooms from the center hallway. You'll also have problems going between floors. Well, you can try it, but you're already at a disadvantage by having to through doors and walls. If they block RF, it won't work.

I suggest you illuminate the rooms from the outside, with a sector antenna. I can't tell which way your 8x12 (ft|meter) rooms are oriented. That makes the building anywhere between 80 and 120 ft|meters long. A reasonable sector antenna has about a 90 degree radiation angle, so you're going to need to locate the antenna about

40 to 50 ft|meters away from the building. You can get closer with a 120 degree sector, but the gain is lower.

These are NOT cheap, but you can build your own. Google for "Franklin antenna" or "AMOS antenna".

Ok. Then you should be familiar with the effects of using bottom of the line hardware to do the job where a better quality device would be more reliable. One of the problems you're going to run into immediately is that low end wireless just doesn't handle your unspecied but apparently substantial number of users. See chart at:

Note the low end hardware that can barely handle a handful of simultanous connections.

Well, he's going to need at least two for the outdoor illumination method I suggested. If you decide to do it indoors, probably at least

2 per floor, time 3 floors. Have your checkbook ready.

Yeah. I can tell by the general lack of numbers and details. See my original reply to your original question. Hint: If it doesn't work on paper, it isn't going to work when you install it.

I have no idea. That's because I only have a vague idea of the layout and construction. It may be impossible if the building is full of steel and concrete. It may be right next to an existing wireless network or sitting under the local municipal wireless LAN. The very LAST thing you specific is the hardware. First, nail down the topology, estimate the usage, figure out how you're going to handle the backhaul (hint: a DSL line isn't enough), and get a budget from the client. If the money is inadequate to do the job, run, because it's not going to work and you probably won't get paid if it doesn't work.

Nope. What you want is any (and I do mean any) cheap wireless router or access point that can handle and external antenna. Set it up where you think your access point(s) are going to be located. Use a laptop for the site surver which is typical of what the visitors are likely to drag along. Fire up Netstumbler and get a feel for the signal strength and reliability. Try multiple locations for the router. Experiment with various antenna combinations. See what kind of speeds you can get at the client. If you're constantly at the low end of the speed range (i.e. 1 to perhaps 12Mbits/sec), it's going to be flakey.

What's the question? PoE works fine. However, please note that there are some rather crappy PoE implimentations. What you want is 802.3af.

You can buy turnkey systems with built in authentication and billing. They all work roughly the same. The AP is setup for WPA-RADIUS (also known as WPA-Enterprise). You have a Linux box running one of the RADIUS authentication database suites. The hard part is entering the customers name and password, keeping the database clean, and dealing with lost passwords. This machine can double as a management workstation to track usage, bandwidth consuption, abuse, bandwidth hogs, hackers, and billing. Some form of URL redirction in the main router will take care of the splash page.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

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