Originally Posted by NN5I
Thanks, N3LYT. Some comments, though. Modern WiFi is 802.11n, which is considerably faster than 54Mb/s (about six times as fast). 54 Mb/s is 802.11g, obsolescent. Here where I am, they offer only 802.11b, which is 11 Mb/s and utterly obsolete.
Multiple repeaters are a very el cheapo way to go. It would be much better, and not much more expensive, to use multiple access points (APs) instead of a single AP and repeaters. Purchasing used equipment and configuring it myself, I could install several APs and the necessary cabling for an equipment cost well under $1,000 total (for five APs) and (at $30 per month per user) pay the whole cost within six months. I have four APs in storage here in the motor home, and one that's in use -- two of which are 802.11n, and not one of which cost me as much as $40. Commercial power levels and outdoor antennas would likely only quadruple this cost. But if it were ten times as much it still wouldn't be much.
If the service is free, there's some justification for going the cheap way. Here, they charge $30 per month, which for 25 users is $750 per month and can buy a whale of a lot of bandwidth, enough for many users to get excellent service.
"Limitations of the technology" and ISPs are disingenuous and transparent excuses for doing things on the cheap and overcharging for poor service that could easily be good.
What would I do, to put 5 APs in a campground on a small budget? I'd likely use a single 802.11n router running DD-WRT, configured as an AP. Then I'd scatter five 802.11n routers around, configured as client bridges (also with DD-WRT), to each of which was wired a single 802.11g router configured as an AP, also with DD-WRT. This would give me about 300 Mb/s total, with 54 Mb/s available at each of the scattered 802.11g APs. If each of these served five users, then each user could have about 10 Mb/s service simultaneously, divided by four if the routers were all single-radio routers, but divided only by two if they were all two-radio routers.
That's best-case, of course. Divide it by two again, and each user could have at least 1Mb/s during busy times, and maybe three times that during sleepy times. And I'd do it for perhaps a couple thousand bucks, with no ethernet to string around the campground. Of course, I'd have to pay the ISP for about 30 Mb/s service, perhaps a couple hundred bucks per month.
Don't like DD-WRT? Use Tomato, or Open WRT.
Objection: my client bridge with an attached AP is -- gasp! -- a repeater, essentially. But it's a repeater with twice as many radios, running in twice as many channels, so it doesn't extract the speed penalty of a repeater with multiple clients.
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