A friend of mine has purchased a specialty publishing company and he's asked me to look into providing wireless access in areas where his customers are likely to be found. I'm being deliberately vague about the details, in case that isn't obvious.
We'd be starting with about 20 locations and adding another 40-50. These are widely dispersed geographically, but all are in locations where there are businesses, though generally not urban areas. One of the main things I'm wondering about is what kind of deals are possible with the larger companies that provide broadband connectivity. Ideally, I'd like to make one deal with one ISP to cover all of the sites, with one bill. All sites are in the western U.S., for now anyway. Second question has to do with hardware and software. If you were putting wireless access points into locations that would be annoying (from a travel standpoint) to service in person, probably located in an existing business, what would you be looking at using? In addition to the wireless access points (and there might be more than one in a location), each site will have a web server with some attached devices for monitoring stuff (again, I'm being deliberately vague). A caching proxy server may make sense, given the nature of the project, but the amount of cached data probably wouldn't be large. I have little doubt that Linux will be the OS for the servers; otherwise, I'm not at all sure. I expect that we'll want to keep physical space and power requirements very minimal, to make it as easy as possible for the businesses where we locate the access points. What should we be looking at in terms of preventive maintenance and spotting trouble before a node goes down? As far as revenue is concerned, we're looking at options. This project is somewhat strategic for the company, so it might make sense to keep it totally free... and there could be some advertising revenue. Or it might be pay once to use it all you can. Least likely would be to do it as a real profit center and charge people for usage... but I'm not going to be the guy to put that part of the solution together. I figure we might as well make a deal with someone who's already in that business if we're going that route. Anybody have any experience with convincing small business owners to allow such installations in exchange for free Internet connectivity and/or advertising? I'm not at all sure if the businesses we're thinking about are even likely to be Internet users yet! As far as traffic is concerned, I wouldn't expect any access point to be used by more than a few dozen users at the same time. I don't see any need for limiting bandwidth, definitely no need for roaming-type authentication or some of the other issues that arise with projects like NoCat. Any thoughts, suggestions, especially pitfalls to watch out for, will be most welcome. Take a stab at what we should expect to spend for everything but labor and I'll really be grateful. Finally, I'm not sure if I want to do all this work myself -- it's not really what I do, but it might be fun for a while. So, if any of you would be interested in working on such a project this summer, please let me know off-list. This could be a part-time, weekend deal for installing systems. We're not in a huge hurry (yet, anyway). Nick -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] (408) 904-7198 -- general wireless list, a bawug thing <http://www.bawug.org/> [un]subscribe: http://lists.bawug.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless
