Wireless coverage over a large area

[bcenn]

Here's the situation...I have a 3 floor building with 16 apartments per floor and I want to have wireless coverage throughout the building. I was thinking of 4 AP's/routers per floor in the hallway ceiling in between the concrete firewalls of the building for a total of 12 AP's for the building. I would setup all routers to not do DHCP and all would have a static IP address, "192.168.2.1, 2.2, 2.3, etc... All would have the samme SSID, encrypyion and password.
My two questions are..would this work?
and ...how would I avoid channel interference?

The routers I am looking at are the Linksys E-2500.
and all would be wired using the LAN ports daisy chained together.

Any help would be appreciated..

 

[thiggins]

I'm assuming you convert the routers to APs (How To Convert a Wireless Router into an Access Point).

I'd be careful "daisy chaining" the LAN ports. Stack too many and you'll get traffic congestion.

Given the way you want to do this, I'd use ceiling mount style APs with PoE so you don't have to worry about providing AC power. Look at EnGenius EAP9950.

 

[Runamok81]

I've done something similar, but only spanning two floors. A few linksys WRT54Gs daisy chained had no trouble covering an 4x2 apartment block each. You can up the TX frequency if you like. Believe it our not, worse trouble we had was microwave-oven interference....

Depending on what types of APs, just space out the channels.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_WLAN_channels

 

[bcenn]

I wouldn't be daisy chaining all of them. I would have a "main" router for the building and would use 1 LAN port to the first AP on each floor then daisy chain to the 2nd,3rd, and 4th.
And with so many AP's would leaving them all on the same channel (9 was what Linksys said, but dont believe them) be OK or by spacing out the channels on each floor be better?

Now could I do this on 3 separate buildings the same way, just changing the static IP's of the AP's?
Building 1- gateway 192.168.0.1, AP IP 0.201, 0.202,etc
Building 2- gateway 192.168.2.1, AP IP 2.201, 2.202, etc
Building 3- gateway 192.168.3.1, AP IP 3.201, 3.202, etc


Appreciate all the help..

 

[stevech]

If your traffic load is constantly high on an AP, try to put it on its own channel. If the load is light on all, they can all be on the same channel without impact.

Try to use only channels 1, 6 and 11 (2.4GHz). This minimizes overlapping channels and interference.

Here's a well know gotcha: If you have people walking with handhelds is use, say streaming a movie while walking down the stairs (yikes), or more likely, using VoIP on a handheld, there's an issue with choosing different SSIDs for different APs. We can go into that if it's applicable - usually not.