Campus wide hotspot

RouterOS Wireless Networking
1

Good Day All,

I am working together with the network administrator of a college’s campus.

There are many staff and students and alumni who stay on campus.

We have around 80 acres which we would like to cover wirelessly.


For test purposes I am looking at purchasing the RouterBOARD 600, with an enclosure, and the R52H 802.11 a/b/g High Power miniPCI card.

However I am trying to find a good place to get hold of an Omnidirectional Antenna for the RouterBOARD.

If anybody has any suggestions as to how I should go about planning to cover so much ground, which antenna to get and where to get it from, I will greatly appreciate it.

We would like to setup a system which would use MAC authentication, to make the connection seamless for our users, but at the same time need to secure the network somehow.

Any advise on this will be appreciated.

Regards
ChildOTK

2

Does anybody know if this will work…let me explain in an example…

Lets say I have enough hot spots covering the campus area, and all hot spots use the same SSID. I drive around the campus sitting with a laptop in my lap connected wirelessly to the hot spot system, is it possible to use all these hot spots with the same SSID, and not lose a connection while driving around the campus?

My plan is to have all these hot spots link back to a main controller’s radius server for authentication. Can a routerBOARD act like a bridge to the main controller so the DHCP lease doesn’t sit on the first hot spot which the laptop connected to? So moving from hot spot to hot spot, the link doesn’t die when switching over?

I hope I am making sense.

3

The only way you will be able to drive around and maintain the same IP is with WDS.

4

Thanks, appreciated.