I need to cover a 100 acre external area with WiFI. Theres no building, simply 100 acres of outside fields.
Using something like a Rb1000 as the main hotspot gateway, does anyone have any idea on the density of access points required to provide a ‘basic’ service over such an area? Would 4 sectors be better than single omnis? Im keen to keep individual hardware mountings to the minimum due to the costs issue of getting electrics to the locations - small clusters would be better.
Ive only ever had to deal with fields full of caravans and other structures that would block wifi, whereas this is wide open.
Using a centralised hotspot controller , with seperate backhaul and client access points on 1,6,11 im hoping I can get some basic roaming working.
Whether oneomni is anough or not depend on the number of clients ectimated and a single interface has its limit in terms of registered client, thorough put averag etc.
100 acre cannot be covered from one single spot, although the power of your wireless card also matter as 1watt’s coverage is not the same as 3watt and what is alowed in the region aslo key factor! Some country your wifi coverage must not exceed 400m square radius etc/ So tell us what you have in mind and we will know which direction to help.
Have you thought about a mesh solution. I have set up many large hot spots using the RB1000 as my main router then using Proxim AP4000MR-LR as my Access Point. This is assuming you can get power to your AP’s. Unless you are using solar power, this could be challenging in a rule area.
I usually work on the basis of circa 1 600mw Radio with an 8db omni per 3-4 acres when dealing with RV parks so was thinking around 30 access points spread evenly over the site. Im not trying to cut down on radio’s , rather the placement of them - If I could use 3 radios each with a 120deg sector on them, and reach a better distance than using the omni’s that would be great - as I said, each tower will need a power feed and the cost of the contractor running the power into this area is going to cost 3-4 times more than the wifi kit out.
Bandwidth to the Internet is only going to be around 20mb so no real issues on bandwidth - i was thinking of using dynamic mesh and running approx 1/4 of the radios as dual radio gateways, with the rest running as single radio repeaters as the budget isnt available to go dual radio throughout.
there could be 300 concurrent users online, although our rule of thumb is 1/6 , so no more than 50 users actively making use of the network at any one time.
Your last post is the key. Ironically, we just did an install where the customer asked for almost the exact same configuration. There space was 116 acres, 1/2 mile by 1/2 mile. The area included two RV parks, soccer fields, baseball fields, animal yards, parking lots, and an arena.
We used 8 antennas/radios in 5 APs.
There is the expectation that as users find the service, that two of the sectors will need to be split to accommodate additional users.
We did not use any type of core device due to customer constraints.
If running power to the PoP is a problem, then your best bet is to reduce the number of transmittimg station to as few as possible using Sectorial antenna with your card. Using high power flat panel (24dbi) might be cheaper and goes farther.
Why not consider using solar to power the remote station! The radios are low power radio and small amount of energy can run through the day.