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Designing a Municipal Wireless Service?
EvilTwinSkippy asks: "I am on a team generating a proposal for the Wireless Philadelphia Initiative. In short I have to figure out how to cover 135 square miles of city with Wifi. I'm reading through the requirements. (Not linking to them, no fair slashdotting the customer, or my employer.) I have already figured out that supporting Wireless B and G simultaneously has to go. As does supporting cars traveling at 60mph. And getting 1MB sustained across the network is a pipedream. In the end, I'm looking down the barrel of designing a network this is projected to have 160,000 users in 5 years, over at least 3000 nodes. I know that Rooftop mesh networks are going to be a large part of the design, as will Linux boxes acting as routers and access points. What massive network issues has 4 years of electrical engineering, and 10 years of hacking routers and servers not prepared me for?"
Consider using dumb access points with battery backup, the kind that can be replaced easily and without much configuration. Centralize your authentication mechanism on the back end.
Not so funny, but (hopefully) informative: check out www.wirelessleiden.nl/english . They already have an extensive wireless network, and are willing to help others wiht advice and such. See website for more.