So I have a bridged WISP and I’m running out of public IP’s. For that reason, and others, I want to change this thing to a routed wisp. I have 9 towers. The way it is now, everything is bridged, my core router is also a dhcp server with 100 publics in it’s scope. It hands Publics down to the customers’ routers. I’ve bought a couple RB850Gx2’s and plan to use them at the tower sites. I have a Ubiquiti EdgeMax Pro router for my core router. The way I have this in my head is this… I’m not sure how to do the IP scheme, but I want each site to have 1 public IP address, and to have all the customers on that AP NAT’ed to use that one IP. So my 100 public IP’s will be able to support 100 sites. My routing skill level is about a 3 out of 10, so I’m not totally helpless, but these mikrotik routers are kicking my butt and I could sure use some help getting these set up like I’m wanting.
Thanks in advance.
Brian
To be honest, if you choose to have routed at the CPE level I can’t think of a benefit to have public IPs down at the towers and NAT CPE traffic at the towers, compared to NATting traffic at the core level. You lose the opportunity to centralise IP management (although perhaps with DHCP relay things can be mended), but more importantly centralised logging and debugging opportunities for your WISP-segment right down to the client side (i.e.: your core router will only see towers, not the individual CPEs, so now you need to setup a syslog server to aggregate logs from the towers in order establish the complete picture).
As everything is under your control from the core router right down the CPE, my initial thought would be to setup a private IP range (e.g. 10.x.x.x) for your entire routed segment, setup OSPF to dynamically manage routes across tower routers and only NAT traffic at your core router using a single public IP while perhaps using the surplus public IPs to provide for aditional service levels or specials for your customers. But then again, I’m not a WISP guy.