[SOLVED] Extend Wireless network

[lam13]

Hello everybody, i really need your help if it's possible,

i need to deploy wifi into 4 restaurants located in the same street in Paris, two restaurants in each side of the street, two of them are separated by a hotel.

Currently there is an internet box in each restaurant, but the problem is that we can't apply roaming, and we want to have only one SSID to share, so i'm looking for the best way to deploy wifi into 4 restaurants in order to provide internet connexion with roaming between the restaurants ?

thanks in advance.

Lam

 

[bill001g]

It all depends on what you mean by roaming. It also depends on what service you provide....ie is it only guest internet or do you need for example the cash registers to be able to talk to each other.

In any case unless you have physical wires between the locations you are going to be stuck using VPN. Means to go across the street you must go to the ISP office and back. Now if you can put wifi radios outside the buildings you could interconnect the buildings with your own private nework but that all depends if you are allowed to do that. You would likely want the antenna/radios on the roof. If you go that router look at ubiquiti outdoor bridge equipment.

Your best bet would be to create a VPN from 3 of the locations back to one central location. You would runt he vpn function on the routers. This would in effect make it all 1 big network. You would then allow access back to the normal internet from the main location.

Hard to say what router I would recommend. It depends on how much bandwidth you really need. If you do not need a lot of bandwidth consumer routers will work in the remote locations. In the central location I would use a PC running one of the many free unix based firewall/vpn services. VPN is very cpu intensive and trying to connect 3 remote loations to a consumer router will put a lot of load on it. There are of course many commercial vpn device you can use instead but they can get very pricey.