is this a “Captive Portal” system?
from what i understand, yes it is.
whitch product do you suggest?
i would like to have a ready to use system, instead of strugling with wifidog.
i want to set up a few antenna’s in my town, i wanna cover quite a big area.
on the roof of my shop, i wanna put 4 antenna each pointing 90º + 1 omni directional antenna pointing to other antenna on the roof’s from people i’m renting.
i would like to put another 4 antenna (90º) on the roof of my home + a omni directional point to my shop.
(if possible using the internet connection from @ home)
is it possible to join the internet connection @ home and in my shop (from same provider) to form a bigger hotpsot?
via a vpn tunnel or what ever?
depending on how much you want to spend, how much speed you need, what kind of wireless technology will you use, you can choose the hardware here: http://www.routerboard.com/
than i need the system that user can login on the antenna on the roof of my shop or my home connection.
the 2 locations are about 900m seperated.
i don’t need a load balance, but that people see only 1 network or the username is valid on either network.
i’m not sure if 4 directional antenna are so much better than a omni directional, like a Ubiquity Bullit.
the current hotspot provider in town is quite bad, i think the route the traffic over to many antenna and during peak times there is hardly any internet.
that’s way i think i should use 2 spots (shop and home) using 4 directional + a omni and the 3rd location is located on a hill and 3 directional + 1 omni should be ok.
using the omni’s as the actual ‘intra network’
than i have pretty much the whole town covered.
both locations have a 25mbit cable connection.
what kind of solution is their avaiable for between 500€ and 1000€ excluding the antenna.
If you plan to charge users, then don’t forget to factor in redundancy, radius server, syslog server, plenty of disk space for the proxy logs (which are usually required for legal reasons). Your antenna setup doesn’t sit quite right, but im tired, and can’t work out why not.
Otherwise, with 500 users on the network, you will be no better off than the existing provider.
You could do it all in RouterOS, it all comes down to how much money you want to spend, and how much money you want to make.
Setting the network up well in the first instance will allow you to run it longer and better. If you are charging 200 odd users say $10 per month then you need to be providing a resilient network - one that keeps running in the event of single failures, as downtime is lost money. By using a centralised Radius server, you can have multiple authentication systems (radius 1 and 2) to make sure the system runs in the event of a failure of one system. You already have 2 DSL connections, so have some redundancy there.
At the very least I would throw a linux machine into the build running MySQL, Freeradius and rsyslog to allow you to centralise all logging and authentication - maybe even Squid to cache some of the throughput to get the most out of your bandwidth.
You don’t need anything else, the captive portal built into RouterOS is very good - we’ve switched over to it 100%.
Look at DMA for a complete solution regarding the Payment etc. Thats not an endorsement, as I don’t use their product - if you really want to be in control of your network you need to develop your own billing / control system using freely available products.