Huge home, multiple routers?

[Stefan_TWT]

Hey guy's Im rather a newbie when it comes to this wireless stuff. While I have been working with wired networks for a while, Ive encountered a huge problem in a new clients home. This problem is the place; its huge, I mean massively big, 20,000+ (yes, twenty thousand) square feet. BIG!!! He wants to set up a wireless network so it works on all 4 floors and out into his yard. The house is still in stick, and we have done tests as far as placement, but with a house this big there is no way that one router is going to cover what I need to do. As far as I can tell Im going to need about 3 routers to cover the areas he needs doing. Note drywall isn't up yet so distance should decrease in finished home. However, Im hoping to have them seamless so that he can wander all over the house/yard and not have to disconnect from one routers wifi zone to another.

For the record I want to use Routers as I have them laying around from a bargain find and don't want to have to spend big coin on just access points. No doubt I should be able to make the routers work? Also I don't want to mess around with antennas and such, I want out of my box solutions; Since I have all these boxes running around the office, routers make the perfect choice. :cool:

So I have the areas mapped out so there is overlap between the 3 zones, it should cover the loss Im going to get from drywall soundproofing etc also. From my understanding all I need to do to the routers is:
1. disable DHCP (obvious)
2. name all the wireless zones the same ie Buckskins WiFi Network
3. have them all on different channels on the routers ie one on 6 one on 7 one on 8?

Oh for the record, the house will be using DSL. In the equipment room the DSL will go into a router (wired) and then into a 24 port switch, all of that would be locked in a structured wiring can that also houses a distribution set up for phone lines. The reason for the large switch is so that all the ethernet ports in the house can be live. My 3 wireless routers will then also be plugged into this switch.

Is there anything Im missing in set up? More importantly will this all work?

My last question is regarding security, I want to set up WAP security on these, again how can I make them work? Any thought on using the Linksys Lunix router so that you have to authenticate with it in order to get on the network, or will the WAP settings allow me to wander with out having to re-acess the network or wait for an ip address to show up? Again I want this to be seamless

Thanks in advance for all your help:

Stephen Dunn

[M/Q]

Could you please tell us if this is a business venture and for profit?

[Stefan_TWT]

Nope, and I suppose I should have explained this;

The guys that did the wiring in the house folded er walked away, apparently the home owner is a pain in the ass. Im taking over from where they left off, all structured et al done. They originally had no wireless solutions for this house. The home builder, some one I deal with on a day to day basis, saw what I did in my home and asked if I could do it for this guy. I agreed I would since there isn't anything to do at this point (all the wiring is done which is what my company does) other than throw in the equipment and configure. I do work for a custom install company, however, this is separate from that company.

This is all me on my own as a favor for the homebuilder, no money will exchange hands. Sadly when I said I would do it, I didn't quite realize the problems that I would encounter (imagine thinking I would just drop one router hooked to one ethernet port some where central to the whole house). While this project is not "business" oriented, its more favor oriented, I suppose the knowledge could help me in the future for other homes. Take it as you will.

Stephen Dunn

Edit add on: Hence me wanting to use equipment I have floating around and not wanting to go and buy stuff. I really am trying to get this done fast and get it out of my hair. Thanks again for any help!!

[M/Q]

Thank you as that helps a lot.

A bunch of questions first.

1. Is the furnace ducting in already?
2. Have you done a site survey?
.... By bringing an AP and client device to the site and see what the coverage looks like. Check to see if there are any other nearby wireless networks that will interfere with yours. I would want to know how it would look to have an AP on each floor and see if I could get a link anywhere on that floor. This needs to be done after the drywall is up as it and the taping is just a huge sponge and will absorb RF until it completely dry in a few years. But it needs to work correctly right away.
3. What is the outside coverage area?
....You have to know exactly what they meant by wandering around the yard. The exact area and alert them that will increase the potential of spill over of their coverage area into public areas. And that is not good.
4. Do you have to use the routers?
....If at all possible get access points, they have more options and will tend to react better with others. Also i would strongly suggest all devices access point, routers, and client network adapters be the same brand if at all possible.
5. How adamant about seamless roaming?
....If anything get that defined as it will be near impossible to get that to happen if you are using the actual technical terminology.
Windows WZC is a real bear to get to work with this. You may even not try to get it to work and just label all the access points with a different SSID and channel and let the user pick the strongest one. It takes high end gear that talks amongst themselves to achieve true seamless roaming.

Now to an important subject, if you are using 802.11b/g you have only three channels that are non-interfering. 1, 6 and 11. You can setup one channel on each floor with the repeat as far away as possible. This along with WZC will be your biggest headache.

As for security, I would not even worry about that until the system was up. WPA-PSK is more than likely sufficient. Is this a high population area or country? MAC filtering will be an option as well. But, please do not shut off SSID broadcasting, it will just make matters much worse for you and WZC. Read my sticky on WZC in the trouble shooting section. Actually read all of the stickies and go to the link about Wireless Resources guide and read that. That will be very helpful.

Well, I will let you ponder this a bit and see what you think. I am sure I have missed a great deal and other here have more/different experience than I do and hopefully will add comments.

[Stefan_TWT]

Thanks for your quick reply:

Here are the general answers to your questions.

The furnace ducting is in. The home goes to board shortly and generally speaking, at least in my part of the world the structured wire is the last thing to go in due to its fragile nature and the necessity of it to be home run.

I have done a very basic site survey, however as I stated, the house has yet to board, thus I cannot be sure I have proper coverage. Im assuming from the time I spent in the home that it should be close to adequate. Regardless, there is enough cat5e run in this home that adding a 4th access point/router to the fold in a portion of the house where wifi was not working would not be a problem. most rooms have at least 2 RJ45's floating about, and there is expansion conduit run through out the house. Thus Im not to worried about it. It seems to be that all the crucial spots have some tie back to the main switch, so im not too concerned about this.

I will do a better sight survey after board is up, but I kinda wanted to see this thing before board just to get an idea/make sure cables were in the right place. Plus it was just fun to see a house that big... wow!!

The yard I spoke of is a "small" (relative to the rest of the house) patio off one of the corners of the house. Its close to where I wanted to place an access point any way. Its not that big, and to be honest, with out some intense antenna action, Im not worried about the neighbors getting spill over. Other networks are also not a concern. I didn't find any in the house or on the lot it self... the lots in this area as you can imagine are large...

I guess Im not sure how MUST seamless roaming is. The concept here is the people using the rig aren't that computer savvy. I would like his kids to be able to wander from room to room, the kitchen to the patio etc etc with out having stuff cut out. If windows is fast enough at resolving these different networks, picking the strongest as it goes, then thats fine. To be honest, Im not to worried about windows machines. His kids all use iBooks and he has a powerbook. Personally I dont have good experience with the wonderful world of windows wireless as I use a mac also. Dont know if that makes a difference. The concept is that I would like them to not see it happen. Brief delays while a new IP is acquired when going from ap to ap is fine I suppose, assuming it was automatic. Actually to be honest, Im not even sure if its mandatory for it to be automatic, half the fun in this for me now is to figure out if it can be done.

When you speak of HIGH end gear, could you drop some model numbers etc? Further any suggestions of ap's that could work well, I mean if using aps is going to make my life much easier, then Id be stupid to fight with it. Lastly, I know I said I was against antenna's but adding like a 15db omni to the center of the house might just work no? I was under the impression that antennas were quite expensive, but Ive come to learn they arn't. Silly me should have done my research first!! My main question with this is more about what pig tails I would need than anything else. How do you identify the different connector each company uses like a "n" vs what linksys uses vs what d-link uses? Any suggestions on where I can get a list of these connectors and their pigtails to convert?

Thanks Again

S

[M/Q]

You are one lucky person. I am an Apple person as well. Still do what I suggested and make each AP a different SSID, different WPA-PSK password as well. Then store that info in the keychain, then as they move from one area to the next there they just have to pick the the correct SSID. It is about as seamless as you get without the higher grade equipment. If they were all the same SSID you might get into an issue of which AP is indeed stronger. If you were using AirPort access point that would be a different story all together.

I have a hard time naming brands as it gets personal and everyone has had different experience. For consumer grade stuff I use DLink and SMC. Up scale a bit with 3Com. Then Cisco and Proxim. If you had the finances getting some of the MIMO equipment might help your situation, but it is still proprietary and requires using the same brand throughout to get the bandwidth.

As for antennas I like to get mine here www.fab-corp.com. They have all sorts of devices and pigtails and such. They are not into the fancy indoor antennas, but usually the vendor has those available.

I have attached a webpage that has the connectors listed and what devices they work on.

http://www.radiolabs.com/products/cables/cable.php

[Stefan_TWT]

Hey:

Thanks again for your quick reply!! We are lucky to be apple people (as he starts a flame war)!!! Any who... The room in this house where all the main switches etc will be stored is rather central. As such Im going to try and toss a 12 or 15dbi antenna into it and see what happens. I have an existing D-Link router cheepy so Im going to pig tail onto that and watch what happens. My guess is that a 12 should do the trick nicely. But we will see what happens. Lets be honest, the antenna costs as much as the other access points will so I may as well try it first. Any thoughts on how this might work out?

Stephen Dunn