thanks for your responses! resending to the list - hope you don't mind On Mon, 2003-09-22 at 19:40, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > On the simple question a vs. b - forget a. It's analagous to running fiber > to every apartment when you can carry 10mbps over cat 3 phone wiring, and > your connection to the net is probably going to be 1.544 Mbps, You're right we don't need the full bandwidth of 802.11a but given the installation costs, hardware cost is not very important and if we're likely to see higher rate for greater distance it might be worth doing. (i understand a falls off very steeply). You mention that 2.4 is noisy, but given 20 families with microwaves, 2.4gHz phones bluetooth noise etc I thought it might be more advantageous. (not many 5.8gHz phones yet) I don't know about penetration of walls/windows of 5.8 vs 2.4 2.4 certainly penetrates walls/windows in our building since I can use my own apple airport ap from the gazebo.
> If you _really_ want to be forward thinking then 802.11g will work with people > who just have b cards, and still offer high speeds later. Realistically, > when do you think you'll pull an OC3 into your complex? never - 8Mbit is the max we'll probably ever install. I want to consider the connection rates at the low signal areas. I don't know if it's better to have no signal in some areas or variable signal in all areas (or if a vs b would do that) > > As for the antenna - it's not so much were you put the antenna as it is > where the ANTENNA puts the signal. sure but give that I don't want any wierd lobes i expect we'll use a pretty standard omni ... > > "professional" can mean anything - just like "deluxe" or "new, improved" - i was looking at the dlink gear because it puts out 200mw instead of the 30 that their consumer gear puts out. I suppose they could be lying but... Is there any sort of conduit between > the buildings that you could pull cat-5 as a wired link between two > APs, one > on each building? That would be probably the cleanest way to preserve > spectrum. Otherwise, you can make a spanning tree link out of APs. > I've > done these - they really get solid coverage. Unfortunately I can't run cable between the buildings > > When you place the cutsheet radiation patterns on the cad drawing, you'll > see who is going to get service and where your 20 dB, 10dB and 0dB link > margin lines are. thanks for these ideas - i didn't realize that these diagrams were so accurate. > Is your objective to be able to have complex wide laptop service, or indoor > laptop service so people can couch potato it and surf the net with their > 802.11b laptop? well - both mostly it's so we can share the cost of a network connection but i think people will like using their computer all over the place. > Your signal levels will be substantially different. You > may have to set expectations with users who just bought the $3000 laptop > with the builtin 802.11b card! (alot of the builtin cards are worse than > the cisco/orinoco external antenna-fob cards - they built the antenna inside > a faraday cage! - but it works the 100 feet the factory specs.) I've experienced that first hand... I want to put out enough signal and have enough receive sensitivity so that we have few to no dead spots. thanks again for your detailed responses! brad -- general wireless list, a bawug thing <http://www.bawug.org/> [un]subscribe: http://lists.bawug.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless
