Need Help in setting up wifi in a Student Hostel

[gsrobo18]

Hello experts, I need a strong help in setting a wifi internet connection in a hostel of 300 rooms. The layout is such that the hostel is divided in galleries of 20 rooms and there are 15 such galleries. Now the situation is the administration has provided us internet by Optical Fiber Cable in a control room. That control Room has a 24 port network switch which is connected to optical fiber cable. Now they had told us that buy your own Hardware (wifi routers) and make network. So we people decided to buy wifi routers of our own . I am in charge for setting internet in my gallery. A gallery consist of 20 rooms with a length of 10 rooms facing each other. And the length of the gallery is 30 meters. So I decided to buy :
TP-Link 300N wireless router
[http://www.flipkart.com/tp-link-tl-wr841n-300mbps-wireless-n-router/p/itmd7hn9cw5y3h3k?pid=RTRD7HN3JJYF6WN2&affid=traininga]

3 of these routers will be placed in the gallery in such way that each room will get strength.I will take a LAN cable from that control room and will plug that in WAN port of first TP link 300N router then to connect a new one will take cable from LAN of this router into WAN of the next one.

Now please suggest me that will it work? My Overall connection speed that is coming from 24 port switch is 100mbps.i.e 12.5 MBPS. Will each student get a decent speed.

 

[mjmacka]

Basically you are asking two questions here.
1) How do I configure the wireless?
2) Will each connection be good enough to support all of the traffic?

1) You are going to have major issues if different people are configuring wireless hardware in differently each gallery. My guess is that each gallery is going to have at least one wireless router. By default each wireless router is going to have DHCP enabled and be on the same default IP address range... usually 192.168.1.x. This is going to cause a huge amount of chaos on the network.
To avoid this issue, you need to configure a single DHCP server... and set the other devices up as repeaters.
I am going to ignore the fact that 253 IP addresses to work with per subnet on an internal class C network. That means that you are going to run into network addressing issues. To help address this, change the lease time to like 1 or 2 hours. That means when someone disconnects they will lose their IP address and it will be available to others.

2) For this item, you need to run a speed test and then configure QOS to prevent a single user from using all of the bandwidth.

I hate to say this, but this isn't going to be easy...

 

[boosted1g]

Since everyone is setting up hardware to how they think it should then you should set your Router onto a subnet of something offbeat like 192.168.32.x (insetead of the typical 192.168.1.x).

You can set your gallery to be one large network by configuring the other routers to be access points instead of routers. To do this you wll need to dissable DHCP server on the other two routers and then connect them from LAN to LAN ports (not WAN). So Router 1 will be 24-Port-Switch-->WAN on Router1
Then router 2 and 3 will be LAN port of router 1 to LAN port of router 2/3 (you can also daisy chaind router 1-2 and 2-3).
On the other two routers you will need to set their LAN IP to an IP address in the subnet of Router 1 but with an IP outside of its DCHP server. You will then set its subnet to 255.255.255.0 and its gateway and dns addresses to that of Router 1s IP address.



You will also have an issue with wireless interference with all of these different routers out there. You will have to get a wifi analyzer program for your phone or get inssider for your laptop. You can then see what wifi channel all of the other routers are using.
The primary channels are 1,6,11, so you need to use those 3 channels and not set it to anything inbetween. You might be able to set router 1 and 3 to the same channel if they are far enough apart but 2 will have to be a different channel. And then you still have the problem of the other galleries routers channels interfering.

I get that the administration did not want to deal with it, but by letting the guests each do their own configuring of their wifi networks instead of the entire project being planned out by one qualified individual it is going to be a complete mess.

 

[mjmacka]

boosted1g is correct in what he said. You can kind of immunize yourself from some network issues by using an off of the wall subnet, but it doesn't fix issue 2. Any miss-configured AP will allow clients to take as much bandwidth as it is possible for it to provide and all of the other correctly configured clients will suffer. You really need an enterprise solution here and a competent administrator. I should also point out that most "home" wifi hardware doesn't accommodate more than 50 simultaneous connections well. Most people these days have a cell phone and a computer. That means that each person will be connecting at least one device. Roaming between devices could be an issue too, because certain devices aren't going to handle jumping nicely due to channel/MAC differences.
This is going to get ugly very fast.

My advice here is to get the same wireless hardware across the entire building. Configure the "master DHCP" device and a then client devices (repeaters). Then copy the client config to all of the other devices. That allows the same administrative access, networks settings, QoS settings and all of the other setup info to be the same across all client devices. You will run out of IP addresses, so use a secondary subnet (192.168.2.x) and set u a new DHCP server on that range and change the SSID (wireless network) name.

 

[hang-the-9]

Using a cheap home router, 3 of them, for 300 rooms will have horrible results. You need a wireless access point per 10 rooms at most to keep speeds normal due to distance and walls and about one per 15 people.

You will need ethernet run to several areas around the building with WiFi APs hooked up to those connections. Something like this https://gridconnect.com/industrial-long-range-wireless-access-point.html?gdftrk=gdfV25227_a_7c1592_a_7c6907_a_7c1053&utm_source=google&utm_medium=CPC&utm_term=&utm_campaign=%2FUI%2FProduct+Listing+Ads+General+All&mm_campaign=477cea803cb14c83d8a99b6c7d0cd349&keyword=&mkwid=st3X4DDFr_dc|pcrid|18638691793&gclid=CjwKEAjwqO-gBRCEyp2Fufm0lBASJAAZrX-5XMVdE2RcelDaVtqntm7j0-pQ6A4NfL2mVfn6BBtxnBoCnaDw_wcB

 

[boosted1g]

This is the kind of setup that should have really been done professionaly with enterprise grade equipment. This takes carefull planning and hgher end equipment that while costs more, allows you to use 2 AP for every 6 APs that off the shelf residental equipment would require.

Even a network engineer that specializes in wireless would cringe at your situation.