On 18/12/2012 09:34, Tim Watts wrote:
John Rumm wrote:

On 17/12/2012 08:05, Andrew Mawson wrote:
I have a BT Home Hub providing my ADSL & radiating / receiving wifi.
However I have a distributed site with several buildings well out of
range of the BT Home hub, all of which are linked by CAT5. So far I have
suffered using various wireless hubs cat5 connected, but it is a pain
having different ssid's etc and none are particularly reliable, needing
occasional rebooting.

Is there a 'range extender' that will sit on the cat5 network and
re-radiate/receive the BT Hub transparently in each of the buildings. I
don't really want a boosted full site wifi set up for security reasons.

You can get repeater / range extender APs designed to provide WiFi over
wider areas. However the posh solution are meshing devices. These
automatically establish multipoint communications between each other,
learn about their relative signal conditions and select the best route
automatically.



Those are quite funky - I loaded a meshing enabled OpenWRT firmware (it was
ready loaded with the right stuff just for laziness, otheriwse not
particularly special) onto about 10 Linksys WRT54GS's once and set them on
batteries around a large field with one end near the office WIFI and the far
ends well out of range.

Worked really well.

Yup it does work nicely... no need to tit about with spanning tree
settings either.

With things like the WRT54Gs you will get a so called "lite mesh" since
they only have one radio. So the same radio has to switch between
servicing local AP clients and the backhaul mesh connection. The
implication being that the more hops you have to go through, the lower
the maximum data throughput. (although even 4 hops will still give you a
respectable 4Mps IIRC). The posher kit with two radios does not have
that limitation obviously.


--
Cheers,

John.

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