Building a Wireless Network for an Apartment Complex?

itwerx asks: "I've been asked to design a wireless infrastructure for an apartment complex. Tenants will pay an 'access deposit' and a monthly surcharge to get a PCMCIA/PCI/USB network card along with free installation and, of course, wireless Internet access. The buildings are arranged such that 2 WAP's per building should cover all the tenants (one WAP per side, far enough away to get line-of-sight through the windows). I do have a few concerns, however. All help is appreciated and when we're done we'll put up a HOWTO!"

"My concerns are the following:

• Interference between WAP's (there's several buildings) - there are enough channels if we go 802.11a but cost is a concern.
• Management of 'hitchhikers' - we're planning on manual assignment via DHCP/MAC address for tenants with others having all their HTTP requests get directed to an info page. Anybody done something different?
• Interference from WAP's and other devices that may be owned by tenants! Should we just avoid the default channel and hope for the best?!?

What other things might I need to worry about?"

Comments

what is your job at the complex?

[edrugtrader]

are you just the fix-it guy that has computer knowledge, or a private contractor?

if you are expected to stay in house and manage the thing once it is up, get ready for a lot of sleepless nights and angry users.

it is probably MUCH more cost effective for the complex to just pay for the DSL in all the buildings and keep them hooked up forever. ~$60 a month including a phone line and you have no hassles what-so-ever. then pass the cost onto the tennant

your month cost per tennant will probably be $20-30/month in hardware depreciation and bandwidth usage. plus you would have a HUGE (you didn't give building or unit numbers so i'll guess) setup fee of $10,000+ assuming you get a couple T1s and all the wireless hardware.

as a tenant i won't pay you more than $50 a month (standard DSL cost) so you have to figure out if you can provide all this service and not spend $20 a month per user of your time. i don't think you can.

Don't bother with WiFi...

[YuppieScum]

The whole point about using wireless LANs is to enable environments where you either need to support roaming/migrant users or you have little/no control over the local infrastructure.

Neither is the case here.

You also need to remember that the 11MB/s provided by WiFi is shared between all users. If you have 50 "dwelling units" and two WiFi access points, you'll be offering a service with less maximum bandwidth than bottom-of-the-range xDSL... and you'll be charging for $100 WiFi NICs instead of $10 PCI ethernet NICs (which many PCs now have as standard anyway)... and for a service subject to atmospheric outages (ever use a WiFi network during a thunderstorm) as well as interference from a multitude of other devices like microwaves, cordless headphones and DECT telephones...

I'd recommend taking a bit of up-front hit and running CAT5 to each apartment. Put a switch on each floor (unmanaged 16-port switches are less than $80), and run each floor-switch to a central switch, and from there to the T1 router, squid server and whatever other infrastructure you've going to value-add into the equation.

This is what business-class hotels now do - just provide an ethernet RJ-45 jack and a DHCP server... all a guest has to do is plug in, configure for DHCP, and reboot.

If nothing else, support costs for a wired network are trivial... but for a WiFi? How do you explain to a user that they can't get their mail because the guy in apartment 2B is listening to a CD?