idialman

Hi there . I am setting up a network at my office which is two buildings (2-story) each building is 5000 sf. My office has the cable modem and is centrally located on the 1st floor.

My question is what is the easiest way to set-up a wireless network. Mainly all I care about is having internet connections at each computer. My concern is having coverage to all areas and obviously I don't want to spend thousands of dollars.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance

jimcarree

You'd probably need a couple of access points on each floor, and run a backhaul between them (i.e. connect them together with a wired network).

How many clients are you expecting to serve on this network?

idialman

There will be 50 clients. Is there anyway to do a completely wireless network and not have a signal drop?

I actually am thinking about doing internet only with no network i.e. cafe hotspots. If that is the case does that make things easier?

miketoy

It probably wouldn't affect browsing, but it depends on how many ppl are browsing at the same time.

Another option would be setting up a mesh network.

Wireless mesh network - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I can't give you any more information about setting these up as I've never done it myself, but it gives you somewhere to start using google.

Infact there's software called mesh ap from locustworld - LocustWorld :: The Information Revolution - mesh networking hardware and software

There's an article here: The Open Source WRT54G Story about using a linksys WRT54G and a third party firmware to do things like mesh/WDS, could be something to look at.

jimcarree

You could use WDS to communicate between the access points, but the amount of usable bandwidth drops a lot

idialman

Is the drop-off so considerable that internet browsing would be affected?

miketoy

You could use something the Linksys Linksys WRT54GL Opensorce Wireless Routers flashed with a 3rd party software app like dd-wrt or Sputnik.
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