The companies named are businesses which by definition are in it for profit. Wikipedia, as a foundation has the luxury of standing for a good cause without having to explain it to its shareholders.
You needn't expect any network outages above and beyond the standard switch, AP, and WLAN card failure rate.
The main consideration in your plan is the 802.11 host density. The 802.11 spectrum is divided into 14 partially-overlapping channels. Each channel in 802.11g provides a maximum of 54Mbps (this is theoretical- actual throughput is closer to 25-40Mbps on a good day). Even by configuring channel selection for an even distribution, you'd still end up with at least 7 hosts per channel. Because 13 of those 15 channels would be surrounded by channels with statistically-equal amounts of traffic, you can't guarantee more than 3.8MBps per host (perfect theoretical world), or closer to 1-2MBps in practice.
While 2MBps is fine for internet downloads, you'll experience a noticable delay accessing any sizeable files on network shares, or moving email attachments around.
Additionally, because of the overlapping nature of the 802.11 channels, and the leaving-much-to-be-desired spectral filters in most 802.11 stations, when any one user is transferring a large file and maxes out their channel x, expect all the users on channel x-1, x, and x+1 to experience sluggish performance. Given at least 7 hosts per channel, and at least 2-3 channels affected per burst, any burst large traffic will impact no fewer than 21 users on the network.
In short, yes, you could do it, but count on substantially poorer performance than a wired solution.
And as with all professional-grade wireless networks, accept absolutely nothing less than a strong per-host-authenticated VPN tunnel.
If we can tunnel payloads through DNS, I'd like to see an ISP try to stop high-bandwidth traffic from being tunneled through all the other "allowed" protocols. (Without throttling the entire link of course)
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Teenage Mutant Ninja...Snails?
The companies named are businesses which by definition are in it for profit. Wikipedia, as a foundation has the luxury of standing for a good cause without having to explain it to its shareholders.
You needn't expect any network outages above and beyond the standard switch, AP, and WLAN card failure rate.
The main consideration in your plan is the 802.11 host density. The 802.11 spectrum is divided into 14 partially-overlapping channels. Each channel in 802.11g provides a maximum of 54Mbps (this is theoretical- actual throughput is closer to 25-40Mbps on a good day). Even by configuring channel selection for an even distribution, you'd still end up with at least 7 hosts per channel. Because 13 of those 15 channels would be surrounded by channels with statistically-equal amounts of traffic, you can't guarantee more than 3.8MBps per host (perfect theoretical world), or closer to 1-2MBps in practice.
While 2MBps is fine for internet downloads, you'll experience a noticable delay accessing any sizeable files on network shares, or moving email attachments around.
Additionally, because of the overlapping nature of the 802.11 channels, and the leaving-much-to-be-desired spectral filters in most 802.11 stations, when any one user is transferring a large file and maxes out their channel x, expect all the users on channel x-1, x, and x+1 to experience sluggish performance. Given at least 7 hosts per channel, and at least 2-3 channels affected per burst, any burst large traffic will impact no fewer than 21 users on the network.
In short, yes, you could do it, but count on substantially poorer performance than a wired solution.
And as with all professional-grade wireless networks, accept absolutely nothing less than a strong per-host-authenticated VPN tunnel.
Good luck!
If we can tunnel payloads through DNS, I'd like to see an ISP try to stop high-bandwidth traffic from being tunneled through all the other "allowed" protocols. (Without throttling the entire link of course)