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I'm living in a big 16-floor building. There are 64 apartments in the building, near half of them have ethernet connectivity to different internet providers.

The other half probably don't have computers and internet access. But those who have, usually have a wifi router for home use. This is usually cheap devices on 2.4ghz. Most of them are able to use only 802.11g.

Also, there is building near, which have a lot of same type of clients.

So, I'm faced with a problem: there are a lot of wifi networks and they usually use same channels, so overall performance is weak.

My first idea was to setup cooperation. What if I help everybody in the building to set up wifi network properly. i.e: we choose three zones with centers on 2, 8, 15 floors. Then we move most powered routers there. And all other routers around will join 'existing' network. Like 'extend' them. Pros: Limited amount of channels needed. Cons: a lot, cooperation is hard. Not everybody likely wants to give his router, etc, etc.

The other idea: choose one. And everybody will extend this one network. Share a password between tenants. But here is technical issue: not everybody use same internet provider.

So, the question is: Does such a scheme exist when everybody use his own router but share same channel and network name and password but depending on which access point is used, different internet connection is used?

Most clients are mobile phones but there are some laptops probably, so I can't install any additional software. I can only talk to tenants trying to cooperate.

Thank you and sorry for bad english.

Dmitry Chirkin
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1 Answers1

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This would probably cause more problems than it solves.

  • Systems this wide just doesn't work with a bunch of cheap WiFi routers from different manufacturers, but needs professional devices with some central management (Cisco, Aruba, Ruckus...).

  • There's not so much difference in throughput between WDS and the current situation, where different networks just interfere. Actually, WDS would cause more traffic, as there would be new traffic between the routers.

  • New security concerns will arise because in this kind of co-operation everyone would trust their traffic to their neighbours.

Better solutions:

  • Make agreements on how to use channels.

  • Adjust transmission powers, if possible, to reduce interference.

  • Upgrade to 5 GHz. It is THE solution for limited channels in 2.4 GHz. And luckily, the first ones get to be there alone for a while.

Esa Jokinen
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