Troublesome Wireless Solution

[bleschber]

I've been asked to try and come up with a wireless solution for a mid-sized apartment complex. A previous company came in a few months ago, and failed by trying to use cheap equipment, and forgot to use their heads first. Anyway...

There is 1 front office which will be the head-end of the WLAN, and then 10 seperate apartment buildings A through J. Each apartment building has 3 floors, 16 users per floor, so 48 users per building. If I put up and antenna at the front office, and one antenna for each apartment building, then I connected a wireless bridge to each antenna, and then access points to the bridges with a base station at the head-end, would I be in jepoardy of saturating the 2.4GHz spectrum at any point along the way???

I haven't had any experience in dealing with overlapping wireless signals. Are there great risks having 10 simultanious wireless streams in such close quarters? I have a detailed ASCII layout of the apartment complex I can post if I can make it look right on here.

Any help will be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

<hr>

I've made the ASCII Layout of the apartment complex available online. The URL is:

http://www.crosswinds.net/~bleschber/aptascii.txt

[ciscomoderator]

Since there has been no response to your post, it appears to be either too complex for other forum members to assist you. If you don't get a suitable response to your post, you may wish to review our resources at the online http://www.cisco.com/go/solutions. You may also get design assistance through your local Cisco Systems Engineer at your local Cisco office or reseller. To locate your local Cisco representative, visit http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/687/Directory.shtml

If anyone else in the forum has some advice, please reply to this thread.

Thank you for posting.

[3jsargentiii]

If you use frequency hopping spread spectrum you can get 15 different "channels" that dont overlap. Setting each access point to a different channel could help. (they aren't really channels in Frequency hopped products- the are really hopping sequences that dont overlap at the same time.)

If you are using direct sequence spread spectrum there are only three non-overlapping channels in most products, but with careful test and planning you could reuse the channels by not placing two cells of coverage ajacent to each other.

In either case, test, test, test.

John

[ED CARMODY]

With 10 different apartment buildings, using a DSSS solution offers challenges with setting up a non-interfering channel plan, although it's certainly possible. FHSS solutions do offer more channels, but sacrifice bandwidth.

I would recommend doing DSSS WLAN in the buildings, and then connect the buildings with a free-space-optic solution.

You can contact me offline to discuss your project in further detail, if you wish.