I second the motion for Meraki. I only ordered a single unit to see what it has to offer, as documentation is sparse. It would be great for your application. The Outdoor units are $100, and are just the $50 minis in a plastic enclosure with a small (2 dBi?) rubber ducky and right-angle RP-SMA adapter. The radios are PoE, and there's another hole in the enclosure through which a pigtail (<1/2" diameter, as I learned) might be routed for an external antenna. It's all dead easy; just connect every fifth one or so to your primary wireless system. They actually have rudimentary support for connecting upstream through non-mesh wifi, but there would be a performance hit.
My problem with the Meraki system is that it does not, at this point, allow you to do a combination of free and paid service (paid services are active now, Doug). It's either or. If it's set to paid, even YOU pay. I'd like to GIVE a Meraki node to every subscriber and offer a limited free service, free extended access for the subscribers hosting the nodes, and paid daily/monthly service for others. People share, so why not help them and, at worst, get a little marketing exposure by making freeloaders look at my logo every time they log on. Regular subscribers would be able to log on anywhere someone else on my network hosted a node. That house just out of range but within view of another house on my network could live (happily, in lieu of alternatives) with wifi service through the neighbor's mesh node. Unfortunately, this isn't possible yet. And there's no support for WPA, so I'd need to set people up with tunnels/vpn for security. Almost there, but not quite .. Best, -- Dylan Oliver Primaverity, LLC -- WISPA Wireless List: [email protected] Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
