I've read through some of the WDS fourms as well as the documents on mikrotik's website, and I just can't quite grasp it.

At the moment we have mikrotik units. One on our roof with two cards. 802.11a and 802.11b. The 802.11a links to a tower on the mountain. Which also has 802.11a and 802.11b cards.

on the 802.11b we run hotspot service for people that want to call in and get a user/pass. We also setup dedicated wireless and I autenticate them through pppoe/radius.

We plan to add more locations and i'm wondering if i should use wds or not.

Do you run all wds enabled cards on the same frequency?

Does the client backhaul through wds links? or do i still need my 802.11a backhaul links.

Do all wds links need to see each other. For example. our office can see the tower on the mountain but can not see the new relay unit we wish to add across the valley.

Thanks,
Michael Perdue

Well, in a scaled down version of what you're talking about, I have a hotel that I used WDS to provide services. Inside the building, I had a WDS master node that connected to the internet. Outsite, within line of sight I have a repeater & sector panel aimed at one end of the hotel. At the other end of the hotel, another repeater and sector panel. The last one can only see the first repeater with any decent signal level (the other is like a -86). ANd it works - the first can't see the last, the clients all happily connect.

I've read through some of the WDS fourms as well as the documents on mikrotik's website, and I just can't quite grasp it.

At the moment we have mikrotik units. One on our roof with two cards. 802.11a and 802.11b. The 802.11a links to a tower on the mountain. Which also has 802.11a and 802.11b cards.

on the 802.11b we run hotspot service for people that want to call in and get a user/pass. We also setup dedicated wireless and I autenticate them through pppoe/radius.

We plan to add more locations and i'm wondering if i should use wds or not.

Do you run all wds enabled cards on the same frequency?

Does the client backhaul through wds links? or do i still need my 802.11a backhaul links.

Do all wds links need to see each other. For example. our office can see the tower on the mountain but can not see the new relay unit we wish to add across the valley.

Thanks,
Michael Perdue

It's crazy to use WDS on your uplink to the tower. You should setup the 5x link on the roof as staion mode and the tower as ap-bridge. Then the high point can see any other new sites you may setup in the future. You then need to route your traffic so you don't have it bouncing all over the place with WDS or bridged networks.
I know it's quick and easy to setup WDS but the difference between WDS and routing is like night and day.

Thats just how I do it, but I'm sure someone will say i'm the crazy one.

The current setup is that I have ethernet running to our roof. Then an 802.11b link to clients and a dedicated 802.11a link to the tower.

At the tower is the 802.11a dedicated and another 802.11b link to clients.

The tower 802.11a is an omni and I wish to add more relay stations so my current plan is to setup another relay with 802.11a dedicated back to the omni.

Now the what i'm curious about is should i setup 802.11b links as wds and run them all on the same frequency?

Right now i'm using 1 and 6 for the 802.11b links