Help. 3 Storey Concrete Building Wireless Setup

[ron15]

Hello Guys! Just new here.

I really don't know if this is the right place for this thread. So Mr. Moderator I apologize in advance.

Well, I need help and advice in setting up wifi in this building. Here are the parameters.
1. Wifi will be mainly for the 3rd and 2nd floor.
2. The building is around 250 sqm.
3. Rooms are divided by concrete wall.
4. I do not expect the entire area to have very high reception. Just enough for browsing the web, facebook, research and a little bit of youtube. No file transfer, local streaming, network games (LAN and internet) and the likes. (Except)Preferably capable of handling ip cctv cameras.
5. There will be around 50 person spread out inside the building. Aside from their laptops some might have tablets and smartphones eager to connect once signal is detected.
6. At the very least, I am expecting the setup to handle the surge of connections coming in.With minimal or no dropping of connection. This will usually happen during the evening where everyone is expected to be inside the building. By the way the building is a ladies dormitory.
7. People from the 3rd floor will be able to connect on the 2nd floor and vice versa.
8. Simplest, straight forward setup with Least cost and upkeep.

I have 3 setups in mind but I am really not sure if which will work best or if both will really work. Also I am really not sure what specific device (brand and model) should I use.

1st.
Bombard each floor with N300 or N450 access points. Let's say 4-5 in each floor. All in bridge and have one powerful router for WAN and DHCP.

2nd.
Have 2 powerful routers N900 or up in each floor. Both share one WAN and DHCP.

3rd.
Either the 1st or the 2nd setup but each floor has its own WAN and DHCP. (Is it still possible to have same SSID though each floor has its own DHCP???)

 

[azazel1024]

In some ways the building construction will help out, as that is a very area dense concentration of people, ~1per/5m^2 or 50sq-ft, which seems like an awfully small building for 50 occupants. I guess I am used to the US where you are looking at typically 100sq-ft per occupant for dormitory style buildings once you take in to account bathrooms, hallways, etc. Or is the foot print of the building ~250m^2, with 3 floors, making it actually around a 750m^2 building?

At anyrate, being concrete will help you deploy more WAPs for coverage so each one doesn't have as high a load.

For a router, you'll want to identify one that'll handle 50 simulatenous connections. Plenty of business grade routers will.

If you want to go commercial, my suggestion is one SSID with its own DHCP and router per floor. Just lable the SSID per floor and use the same password for each one. Just tell the residents what the password is for the whole building and they can reuse it on each SSID.

On each floor, you'd really need to test it out and see what you need for proper coverage. <100m^2 per floor isn't really all that much area, even with concrete construction. Without knowing the layout, I'd try for one WAP and one router vaguely equally seperated on each floor.

You can have multiple routers running DHCP on the same network, with the same SSID so long as they have seperate ranges. However, the behavior I've seen is they all tend to get their IP address from whichever router is the gateway.

You could also drive it with seperate networks all cascading to one router for the building that handles each floor's sub-router and set one SSID for the entire building.

For coverage numbers, I doubt more than 2 WAP/Router per floor would be needed. You could do more, but you might have to set them to lower power and you'll also start running in to client collisions (IE the router can hear too many other clients) which might not buy you anything.

 

[ron15]

Wow that was fast. Thanks for the reply!

For the building, your second guess is the right one. The foot print is 250 m^2 so the total floor area is 750 m^2. The building is not really a dormitory as what you said you have in US, here in the Philippines we call it boarding house, bed spacing. People pay for the bed space rather than the room. Usually double deck beds are used. That is why you have a very small person/area. Also we are smaller that people from U.S. so more of us could fit in one room. Hahaha...

Going to the wireless setup.

I think, I would go with the 2 WAP/Router per floor path.

Now, more questions. hahaha..

1. Which is better? One ISP connection for both floors, or 2 isp connection 1 in each floor but only half the bandwith or the first option.

2. Is it possible to have two gateways in one network? For example I chose the second option in question 1. The 2nd floor will have one router connected to a modem via WAN and dhcp range 10.10.10.50-100. On the 3rd floor one router is connected to another modem via WAN and dhcp range 10.10.10.101-150 and also connected to the router in the 2nd floor via switch.

The purpose is that when one gateway gets congested it will route the data to the other gateway in the same network. So if 3rd floor is not using that much 2nd floor could use the bandwidth on the 3rd floor and vice versa. (just using my imagination hahaha)

3. If i will go consumer/commercial grade what specific device should I buy? If business grade?

It seems that TPlink has a huge market here locally and are much cheaper than ASUS and Netgear. I'm eying for N750 or N900.

For business Ubiquiti is also present in the market. I'm eying on nanostation uniFi.(does this also function as a router?) Our house is just a block from the build so its possible to use the point to point function for the cctv rather than using the net for monitoring.

Am I choosing the right devices?