Can I turn on WDS on Customer A to make the following work? Tower - Customer A - Customer B? Would this require WDS being turned on everywhere, or could I just do it on Customer A. Would Customer A still have all the bandwidth available and Customer B had half?
In our beta system, one of my friends wants on, but trees, grain bins, topography, etc. are all against him. His grandparents another half mile away have a perfect link (within 3 db of Radio Mobile without fine tuning) and he has a perfect link to them.
As with any link, a WDS link requires two ends. You would need to set up WDS for both Customer A and the tower in order to have a link between them. You have a choice with Customer B, either:
Set up Customer B as a client to the AP at Customer A.
Set up a second WDS link between Customer A and Customer B.
If you are using simple 802.11 communication between all sites, i.e. no nstreme, the total bandwidth will be limited to the slowest link. In other words, the customers will be sharing the bandwidth. If you would like this to be symmetrical, you might want to set up bandwidth sharing.
Instead of using WDS, would I be able to setup a Virtual AP on Customer A and then link A - B that way?
I really don’t want to setup WDS on my tower. I guess I could setup a Virtual AP on the tower and then have Customers A and B on their own SSID and whatnot with WDS enabled, keeping the primary SSID on the tower non-WDS.
I guess a good practice could be an SSID setup for non-WDS access and another for WDS access on every AP. Non-WDS for increased simplicity and throughput potential for those subscribers that don’t need WDS, and then have a WDS SSID for customers that need to take advantage of that.
I can think of one scenario on both sectors of my tower (I have 2x90*) that could take advantage of a scenario like this. The other has maybe a half dozen clients in a small pocket where one has a tall TV tower and no tree issues.