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Hello. I'm looking for an advice on WLAN implementation here.

Wireless coverage needs to be set up at floors 3 and 5 of a building with thick concrete walls and ceilings.

There is an opening at the center of the building. The opening is vertical cylinder going through all floors, about 20 meters in diameter and occupies approximately a quarter of each floor's area.

Therefore, it is possible to establish direct-sight radio link between floors 3 & 5. A lot of bounces is also expected as finishing is mostly shiny marble all around (does it help in transmitting 11g or 11n?).

However, such setup would probably require restricted antennas placement as the vertical separation is quite high. So the question is would 11n help getting more reliable radio link between the floors compared to 11g? Clients need 11b/g to be provided at the end.

And... could you please recommend a piece of consumer-grade equipment which combines AP and repeater functions in one unit? (I mean an AP that uplinks via radio, not Ethernet)

Thanks!

Is there a reason why you can't wire the AP's on the different floors?

I love wireless and all, but if you can wire it, do it.

Gene

Reasons are mostly aesthetic: walls, floors and such in the building are mostly of marble. With electric grid installed during build-time, it is not trivial to add another wired network: the area is quite large, cables are difficult to hide.

For now, I settled to set up a WDS network with 3 or 4 WRT54GL's. If throughput to become an issue (the basic rate of 54 Mbps will be halved thrice: down to about 6 Mbps, which still looks acceptable for our tasks) those devices allow for reconfiguration for wired interconnect.

Have you thought of using a Homeplug solution? They are getting really good right now.

Gene

Hm.. the idea is cool. I'm going to look into it.

Thou price-wise every such an adapter is the same as an additional WRT54GL (which is BTW unbelievably versatile with the custom Linux firmware).

And I suppose, if for each AP-site two physical AP's will be used (one for end users wired into another - in a different channel, possibly non-standard ch.14 supported by WRT54GL - for the backbone), the solution becomes pretty solid and universal.

What do you think?

(Currently I see it as overkill to use 2 APs in each cell anyway, so for the start I decided to sacrifice bandwidth for simplicity)

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PS
I've just deployed my first public AP with user/password access control via external RADIUS. More AP's to be added in the next couple of weeks.