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Wireless Networking Hardware

A Wireless Network for a 4-Story Apt. Building? 578

Posted by Cliff from the making-a-place-your-home dept.
zzzreyes asks: "I live in a 4 storey building, and pretty much everyone in this building is into gaming and computers. I have just received, through the death of a great aunt, about $7,000. I want to know how and what I should buy, to provide wireless access through out the whole building, so we can all share one connection. There are 6 double-room apartments on each side, and we only have four floors. I'll hopefully have access to the elevator shaft, in case I need it. Will $7,000 be enough?" How cheaply could you do something like this, assuming you had access to much of the building? What would be the best way to set up the access points to guarantee the best coverage for the whole building?
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A Wireless Network for a 4-Story Apt. Building? More

A Wireless Network for a 4-Story Apt. Building?

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  • I'll do it! (Score:3, Funny)

    by SkunkPussy ( 85271 ) on Wednesday February 04, 2004 @08:38PM (#8185253) Journal
    if you give me the $7000 I'll get you the equipment you need.

    ahem

  • all for one one for all (Score:5, Insightful)

    by kayen_telva ( 676872 ) on Wednesday February 04, 2004 @08:38PM (#8185254)
    if everybody shares the same connection, online gaming will suck, unless you have an OC3

  • Roomie (Score:3, Funny)

    by savagedome ( 742194 ) on Wednesday February 04, 2004 @08:38PM (#8185257)
    There are 6 double-room apartments on each side, and we only have four floors. I'll hopefully have access to the elevator shaft

    Do you, ummmm... or someone in the building, maybe, needs a roomie?
    I dont' even need the elevator. I will take the staris. Promise.

  • 1 802.11g AP (Score:2, Informative)

    by TOOSuave ( 610521 )
    Shouldn't an 802.11g AP do the trick for around $100? I can't imagine spending much more than that for the sake of my neighbors... Maybe a repeater on every other floor would be the worst case scenario...

    • Re:1 802.11g AP (Score:5, Interesting)

      by sterno ( 16320 ) on Wednesday February 04, 2004 @08:55PM (#8185454) Homepage
      It depends on the building materials, but I've found that you're lucky to get 802.11 anything through 2 walls with any strength left. So yes, you'll want to set up repeaters, etc.

      $7000 should be more than plenty for this. In fact, you could probably do this for under $1000 without too much trouble, then take the remaining $6000 and do something useful with it. For example, take a trip overseas and spend a few weeks somewhere you've never been. London is a great place to start. Foreign, but not too foreign.

      For under a thousand you can get round trip airfare for two to London, leaving you with $5000 to blow while you are there. So, let's say two weeks in a decent hotel (say $200/night). That's $2800, leaving you with $2200 for meals, etc. Or hell, just do a one week venture and live really high on the hog.

      • Re:1 802.11g AP (Score:5, Interesting)

        by orthogonal ( 588627 ) on Wednesday February 04, 2004 @09:22PM (#8185691) Journal
        It depends on the building materials, but I've found that you're lucky to get 802.11 anything through 2 walls with any strength left.

        In the US, at least, it's generally recognized their are two types of apartment building: "pre-war" and "post-war" (from the submitter's spelling of "storey" I'm guessing he's a Brit or other Anglophone).

        The war referred to is the Second World War; the difference in the buildings is in the materials (and to a lesser extent, the quality) of construction. Basically, post-war building don't have "real" walls: they have plasterboard or Sheetrock (it's a capitalized because it's a trademark, like Kleenex, I think), thin pieces of crap that stop nothing but physical access and light. Radio, and more annoyingly, sound, goes right through.

        That's why if you're shopping for an apartment, and you even intend to immerse yourself in your opera music, rock out to your heavy metal, or kill kittens to your porno collection, you want pre-war construction. Even if you don't have any loud habits, odds are your neighbors will, so you still want pre-war construction.

        The down-side of pre-war construction is that real walls absorb radio waves too. With my admittedly underprepared USB WiFi transmitter, I can see a noticeable weakening of the signal even one room and 10 feet away. I can get a very poor signal (3%-10) up to about 40 feet away, at the elevator, and nothing once I'm in the elevator.

        But I can get a half-way decent signal (30-40% signal) from twice that distance if I'm in line of sight of one of my apartment's windows.

  • Ethernet (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Mod Me God ( 686647 )
    With so few and so fixed appartments I recommend you set up ethernet connections to a common box. Less than 1K total cost. Then set that box to whatever external connectio you like (if you like to).

    • Re:Ethernet (Score:2, Informative)

      by SkoZombie ( 562582 )
      I'd have to agree. If you lay good copper, you'll get better speeds anyhow, if you're using the 2.4GHz band, every time around dinner there'll magically be no speed in the network thanks to Mr Microwave. 7K would easily cover all your infrastructure, you could even slurge on a sweet intranet games/file server ;)

    • Re:Ethernet (Score:2, Informative)

      by kpost ( 594219 )
      I was co-founder of a company that attempted to wire residential apartment buildings many years ago. It turns out that wiring buildings after primary construction can be pretty expensive (just the labor: cost of wire/switches etc. per port aren't too bad) and can be hard to justify.

      In addition, it sounds like the questioner has permission of the building owner to use the elevator shaft. He probably doesn't have permission to drill holes in the walls/ceilings/floors and install conduit which he would ne

  • Equipment cheap. Labor NOT (Score:5, Informative)

    by fnord123 ( 748158 ) * on Wednesday February 04, 2004 @08:40PM (#8185280)
    Before you spend any of that money, check if you owe taxes on it. With whatever is left, plan on spending a lot of the $$ on labor.

    You will need access hardware from/for your ISP (e.g. cable modem, DSL modem, etc. Usually Most likely you will need at least one wireless AP for each floor. Depending on the thickness of walls and size of the building, multiple APs might be necessary. Budget around $100 (rough number) per AP for consumer grade equipment, which is all you probably need. Don't forget to put each AP on a different wireless channel - and stagger the channels to minimize frequency overlap (e.g. Floor 1: Channel 1, Floor 2: Channel 9, Floor 3: Channel 4, Floor 4: Channel 11).

    You probably need a NAT since you will have many people needing IP addresses, unless you want to get a subnet prefix from your ISP (at $7k that isn't likely). So at least one NAT box is needed.

    If you are comfortable with Linux networking, take a look at a Linksys WR54G as described here [broadbandreports.com] - one of these on each floor would allow you to have a cheap AP + detailed control of banwidth (i.e. make sure that no one guy hogs all your Internet connection).

    At the access point you will need to put that NAT mentioned above, plus a switch for between floors. The Linksys could act as both and is a cheap solution. If Linux isn't your bag, then a decent low end (SOHO router) such as a D-Link DFL-300 would be a good thing (with built-in firewall to boot, which would help).

    In terms of wiring, get at least CAT 5 cable run ("CAT 6" is even better) to every floor. A separate wire to every floor, all culminating in the basement (or wherever your Internet access is) gives a measure of reliability in case of a wire fault or router fault on one floor. A patch panel at the termination point of all the wires is a good idea.

    Expect to spend a large amount of the money on the labor for getting the wiring done. Professional cable pullers can charge high 2 digits to 3 digits/hour. If you hire a professional company to do the whole thing including picking equipment, setting it up, etc., then $7k isn't near enough.

    • Re:Equipment cheap. Labor NOT (Score:5, Insightful)

      by fnord123 ( 748158 ) * on Wednesday February 04, 2004 @08:44PM (#8185342)
      Forgot to add: Most ISPs do not allow you to share bandwidth like this, so expect to have to pay extra $$/month for a business plan.

      All in all I agree with the other posters. Save your $$ and let your neighbors buy their own access!

      • Re:Equipment cheap. Labor NOT (Score:5, Insightful)

        by ptbarnett ( 159784 ) on Wednesday February 04, 2004 @09:04PM (#8185527)
        Forgot to add: Most ISPs do not allow you to share bandwidth like this, so expect to have to pay extra $$/month for a business plan.

        Speakeasy [speakeasy.net] will allow you to share your bandwidth. However, you remain responsible for it.

        Save your $$ and let your neighbors buy their own access!

        Or you can become an administrator in Speakeasy's NetShare [speakeasy.net] program. Everyone pays the price you specify to Speakeasy (minimum $20/month), Speakeasy provides email and newsgroup access, and credits half of their monthly fee to your account.

        You can now get 3.0 Mbit downstream, 768 Kbit upstream with 4 static IPs from Speakeasy for $110/month. At $20/participant, it will only require 11-12 additional subscribers to reduce your net cost to zero (after taxes).

    • ISP that lets you share bandwidth.. (Score:5, Informative)

      by Sleepy ( 4551 ) on Wednesday February 04, 2004 @09:00PM (#8185502) Homepage
      Speakeasy.net

      They let you share bandwidth. You sign yourself as accountable so you might want to create a legal entity to hide behind (corporation or nonprofit).

      They'll even take care of the "billing" for you. You could charge everyone actual-cost, with a higher bill for the guy who consistently "forgets" to turn off P2P filesharing to/from the outside..

    • Re:Equipment cheap. Labor NOT (Score:5, Informative)

      by lucifuge31337 ( 529072 ) <daryl@in t r o s p e c t . n et> on Wednesday February 04, 2004 @09:29PM (#8185751) Homepage
      In terms of wiring, get at least CAT 5 cable run ("CAT 6" is even better) to every floor. A separate wire to every floor, all culminating in the basement (or wherever your Internet access is) gives a measure of reliability in case of a wire fault or router fault on one floor. A patch panel at the termination point of all the wires is a good idea.

      While I'm sure you're well intentioned and really trying to help (and the rest of your suggestions were good), this is a perfect example of why NOT to ask /. how to do technical things. Especially if they involve layer 1 or tools of any sort.

      A 4-story building most likely would cause significant issues (especially from the 4th floor to a basement) with ground potential differnces. That's why professionals use fiber for risers now. The old school way would still require STP for a run like that.

      Failure to determine if this type of thing is a problem can result in: poor connections, no connection whatsoever, blown ethernet ports, etc. etc.

      From firsthand experience on this, I was diagnosing an issue on an 8-floor STP run where some cable monkey moron (probably an electrician claiming to be a data cabling specialist) grounded both sides of the run. Being an idiot myself, I accidentally brushed the back of my hand on the shield after clipping it off on one side. It almost knocked me on my ass. And the connection ran without fault after that.

      Bottom line....anything more than 2 floors is not a job for an amateur. Actually, anything on different floors/potentially different electrical services should be carefully considered.

  • One word of warning ... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by lambent ( 234167 ) on Wednesday February 04, 2004 @08:40PM (#8185281)

    I applaud your noble effort. However, I must warn you. Once you take responsibility for setting up this network, everytime something goes wrong, you will be the first person the tenants come to for help. Even though it sounds like your neighbours are computer oriented, I guarantee you will be swamped with more problems than you bargained for.

    Good luck.

    • Re:One word of warning ... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by WuphonsReach ( 684551 ) on Wednesday February 04, 2004 @08:53PM (#8185421)
      Better put a lawyer on retainer with that plan, because guaranteed that you'll be the one left holding the bag should the cops come knocking about kiddie porn, warez, cracker attacks, etc.

    • Cost of Ownership (Score:5, Informative)

      by fm6 ( 162816 ) on Wednesday February 04, 2004 @09:34PM (#8185790) Homepage Journal
      Yeah, as always people look at the cost of the technology, but not how much it costs to own the technology.

      I laughed out loud when this guy asked if $7000 was enough to network a three story building. I helped build a wired network in a similar building, and we didn't even spend $200 -- which included an expensive crimping tool that's nice to have anyway. Of course it would have added about $500 to do it wireless (assuming you need three WEPs) and maybe another $1,000 if we'd had to buy wireless NICs for everybody (all of the comptuers in the building, most of which were Macs, already had wired NICs) but that's still a long way from $7000.

      But a system, any system, needs to be maintained! I got involved in this project because a non-techie friend asked me to help out. My first advice to him was not to try to sign up everybody in the building right off the bat. Instead, they should start with the two households minimum (my friend didn't live in the same apartment as the DSL connection) and then expand it slowly. In the event, I think he decided that it wasn't worth the hastle to have that many more people involved.

    • Re:One word of warning ... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by PCM2 ( 4486 ) on Thursday February 05, 2004 @05:41AM (#8187423) Homepage
      Even though it sounds like your neighbours are computer oriented, I guarantee you will be swamped with more problems than you bargained for.
      Yeah ... for example, watch how fast your landlord starts raising the rents in the building once he catches wind of the "free Internet access" his tenants are enjoying. He'll start with the new vacancies (without mentioning to any of the current tenants what he plans to ask for, of course). Once he gets a few happy customers, he'll work on raising rents for you and all your gaming/net buddies as well.

      Maybe you'll be shrewd enough to figure out that he's started advertising the wireless, and that's why he's charging more for rents. So you'll threaten to dismantle the whole system. At that point, BOOM! He'll slap you with a lawsuit, seeking both:

      1. An injunction preventing you from gaining access to the building for purposes of making unauthorized modifications, including but not limited to removing the network hardware
      2. Damages, for your having installed it against his wishes in the first place.
      Mind you, I come from San Francisco, so maybe my view of landlords is a little too pessimistic for where you live. YMMV.

  • Test signals.. encrypt.. mac restrict (Score:5, Informative)

    by nurb432 ( 527695 ) on Wednesday February 04, 2004 @08:40PM (#8185282) Homepage Journal
    Simple suggestions..

    1 - take a laptop around and see how signal strength is..

    2 - block all outside access via mac address restrictions and encryption.

    3 - expect some boob to start dling kiddy porn and get you in trouble with your isp and have your connection cut off... ( remember most AUP's prohibit this with out a business account )

    4 - good luck not getting sued.

  • Try the Avaya Solution (Score:3, Informative)

    by blackbearnh ( 637683 ) on Wednesday February 04, 2004 @08:40PM (#8185284)
    I just checked out the product for a magazine review I'm writing (checked out means I talked to the marketing reps). They have a cool distributed solution where you deploy $300 thin access points that do 802.11b/g all over the place (like one in every apartment, and run normal Cat5 wire back to a central switch that automatically configures the APs for best channel coverage/etc. Single point of configuration, saturation coverage, and they said a small installation could be done for $5,000. You can even put in the building plans into their software and it tells you where to put the APs.
    • Fuck Avaya right in the ear. I have a VPNet VSU-10 VPN box and they want like $150 to reset the password. They make you send them the box and everything, so add another $20 for shipping. Meanwhile there's a big block of jumpers inside the unit and I bet the proper settings thereof will clear the configuration.

      If you buy from Avaya, you will be subject to vendor lock-in, and you will need a support contract. It's probably $5,000 for the (grossly overpriced) equipment and another $3,000/year for support dur

  • Wireless Bridging & Repeating (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 04, 2004 @08:40PM (#8185287)
    Ensure you go with a system that supports WDS (wireless distribution standard) for wireless bridging and repeating.

    With WDS you could implement a wireless "backbone" with 4+ access points, one (or more) per floor. Then one access point would connect to a router box which would in turn be connected to your broadband link.

  • Why the wireless obsession? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by phr1 ( 211689 ) on Wednesday February 04, 2004 @08:41PM (#8185294)
    If you really can get to all the apartments, why not put an ethernet drop into each one? Let people install their own wifi points if they want them.

  • My estimate (Score:4, Funny)

    by yo303 ( 558777 ) on Wednesday February 04, 2004 @08:41PM (#8185295)
    It will cost exactly $7000. In fact, just give the money to me and I will fly over, install the network, and take care of everything.

    yo.

  • It's none of my business, but I'd love to know... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by fejikso ( 567395 ) on Wednesday February 04, 2004 @08:41PM (#8185300) Homepage
    Why are you subsidising the whole cost of the installation?

    If all the people in your building want to get wireless, they should chip in, shouldn't they?

    On the techical part, I don't know, but I think $7000 should be MORE than enough to get the whole thing running in all the building.

    Again, it's none of my business, but it is my personal suggestion not to be so eager in spending so much money like that. Unless you REALLy want to play with those guys. Who's going to pay for the fixed internet connection fees later?
    • I agree, let everyone pay for it, unless you want to be declared the first geek-saint. I lived in an appartment I I convinced the owner to put UTP in every room. I put a hub in the basement and provided internet access to my 7 neighbours for 5 Euros per month. Since my cable ISP had no download limit, only a 80kb/sec bandwith limitation (I prefer that over a 500kb/sec with 10GB dowload/month), I had no worries. Only a few people overloaded the network but I wrote a script called ditchthebitch.sh to take ca
    • I really have to agree here.. 48 appartments comes to about $20. each for the wiring and APs another $10/month each would cover a decent high speed hookup to the building. If you want to cover any spare change above that, then go ahead. If it's a condo building, take the idea to the strata council. If it's rental suggest it to the landlord... I'm guessing that it'll make the apartments that much more salable.

      Given that you had to ask the question, I'd guess that you could probably use some help.

      If you'

  • "I live in a 4 storey building, and pretty much everyone in this building is into gaming and computers.

    Is there a vacancy? I want to live there!

  • Ethernet with multiple access points (Score:3, Informative)

    by quizwedge ( 324481 ) on Wednesday February 04, 2004 @08:43PM (#8185323)
    I'd run the cable to a central switch and have an access point on each floor. This setup will work well for lan games, but if you're all trying to do online gaming, you better have a decent connection.

    I know this part doesn't answer your question, but I'd agree with others. Invest the money, buy a house, pay off debt or do something you wouldn't otherwise get a chance to do.
  • I'm sure many companies would wire the whole building for less than $7,000. Are you sure you want to get yourself involved with such a risky venture?

  • A good start (Score:3, Funny)

    by veg_all ( 22581 ) on Wednesday February 04, 2004 @08:44PM (#8185333)
    The elevator shaft will be useful as those wireless packets will need some way to get from one floor to another and packets are far too small to negotiate the 4" riser on a common apartment stair. They can easily shimmy up and down those cables, though.

  • $7000...? (Score:4, Informative)

    by TellarHK ( 159748 ) <tellarhk@NOSPam.hotmail.com> on Wednesday February 04, 2004 @08:44PM (#8185341) Homepage Journal
    It shouldn't cost anyplace nearly that much money. For that much, you could probably get the whole place wired. Gaming isn't going to be a good thing for wireless, anyhow. But if you insist on doing something wireless, what I'd suggest would be to look for some powerful 802.11g gear (Just top-of-the-line consumer stuff, nothing pro level) and just put one unit on each floor in as central a location as you can manage. It'll be hard to work out the specifics, but I can't imagine it taking more than one unit per floor unless the rooms with computers are long distances from eachother.

    Now what I'd really suggest would be to have it wired. This may be something to discuss with the landlord and it wouldn't even be that tough to do, in some cases. You could possibly even run wired connections through the same lines the cable goes.

    But if wireless is truly the only option you want, and you can get access to the elevator shaft my suggestion would be to run a 100Mbit line into the shaft to a switch, then drop a potent WAP at each floor level on seperate channels and names, that way you're not sharing all the bandwidth for all the floors. Linksys WAP11's would be good for this as you can hack them to get a little more power.

  • well... (Score:2, Informative)

    by ophix ( 680455 )
    for 7 grand, i would look at just cabling it instead, personally. 1000' spool of cat5e should run you no more than 40 bucks, ends are usually about 30-40 bucks for a bag of 100. as far as the internet goes, unless you get something that has good upstream in addition to great downstream, the internet is going to seem like a dog. also if you have ppl who hog it with things like kazaa, then its going to feel slower than dialup for everyone else. you are definately going to want to look at some kind of traf

  • Owning or renting? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Tripster ( 23407 ) on Wednesday February 04, 2004 @08:49PM (#8185384) Homepage
    Ok, you say apartment so I'm assuming rental to begin with, don't bother! Take your $7,000 and use it for a downpayment for a house of your own, interest rates are low right now and you are much better off paying a mortgage of your own rather than someone elses for them.

    Now, if it's a condo, check the D-Link DWL-900AP+ access points out, they will run in repeater mode so you could share probably get away with doing it with 2-4 units spread around the top floors.

    The big question will be your gateway, with a dozen apartments you could all share a T1 line easy enough but there are monthly costs and likely be the same or more than cable/dsl alternatives and really that's only if all apartments sign up and keep paying.

    If you are renting, let the landlord build this type of "service" rather than wasting your own money, put it to better use, just buy 1 AP and whomever can see it can link up.

  • As A Former Landlord, I Say Don't... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by TheWanderingHermit ( 513872 ) on Wednesday February 04, 2004 @08:50PM (#8185399)
    I used to work as a property manager for a number of different properties spread out through the city, with a number of different owners.

    From that point of view, DON'T DO IT!

    Consider:

    1) You have to get permission to do any wiring and you'll be running wires of some type (power or CAT5) through the building, which will require the owner's permission.
    2) You can spend all that and have a great time, but the landlord can decide to sell the building at any time, and you may suddenly find out you have to leave either at the end of your lease term or with as little as 30 or 60 days notice.
    3) How do you know, after doing all that work, that you'll get to take the equipment with you when you leave?
    4) Why are you investing in a building you are only renting? (You have no way of knowing that, right or wrong, you'll be able to take the equipment with you when you leave!)

    Basically, you don't know how much longer you'll be living there and a number of things could result in an early termination of the lease, or other problem. While the equipment is yours, there are a number of ways the owner can keep you from taking it. Hell, the owner could even sue you for putting it in.

    As a property manager, my job was 1) Protect the property owner from any harm or damage (not just physical) (that includes the property itself), and AFTER THAT, 2) Protect the tenant from harm (also not only physical), but this comes under #1 because anything that hurts the tenant could result in a suit or other harm to the owner, including inappropriate or illegal actions of the owner that hurt the tenant.

    In such a role, I can tell you that I, and almost every property owner I have either known through networking, or worked with, would not want a tenant, no matter what they know about computers, crawling through a building and installing equipment the OWNER doesn't fully understand. And if an owner allowed it, you have no way to be sure they'll let you keep it later, or even allow it to continue to operate.

    The owner also has to consider what could happen if a building inspector came through and you had violated a law you weren't aware of.

    Maybe your landlord allows this. That doesn't mean you'll stay there long enough to make it worth while, or that you can keep the equipment later. It's like digging for gold in someone else's mine when, at any minute, they can walk in and say, "I've changed my mind. You can't keep the gold. It's all mine." Would you do that? Most likely not. Doing this is the same thing.

    Be wise. Invest in something you'll have for a long time or that is yours, like a car, or a house downpayment, or even a cruise to an exotic location.

    Oh, and I live in the US, so I don't know laws in other countries, but you've still got to face the fact that what you do may benefit you for only a short term and could benefit the owner for years.

    (Oh, your lease is solid, you say? Check. I saw buildings bought and sold all the time -- sometimes tenants had till the end of the lease to move out, sometimes only 60 days. There are too many variables to be sure you will stay for years in an apartment.)
    • You have to get permission to do any wiring and you'll be running wires of some type (power or CAT5)

      He said he wanted wireless...aside from the wiring needed for the cable/dsl momdem which is normally already there anyway, he shouldn't have to run any extra cabling anywhere.
      • He did. And in a perfect world, all he'd need is to have a few other tenants put routers in their apartments. But theory and practice are never the same.

        Wireless may still involve running power cables to odd places where routers won't be disturbed.

        I don't know if you can relay from one wireless router to another, but I've found that when you're installing ANYTHING, especially doing anything with plumbing or power in a building, you will ALWAYS run into unpredictable problems. He may end up doing much m

    • Re:As A Former Landlord, I Say Don't... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by D.A. Zollinger ( 549301 ) on Wednesday February 04, 2004 @09:29PM (#8185748) Homepage Journal
      The parent poster is saying some very smart things - listen. If you are absolutely certain this is the direction you want to go, consider possibly an ad-hoc network of wireless cards in everyone's computer. This will allow all of you to network with each other without installing anything permanent. I would purchase your own wireless card, and encourage the other tennants to purchase their own wireless cards that they can take with them when they leave. If not that many bite, you can perhaps offer to subsidize their purchase - but be patient with your friends before blurting out, "I'll buy your card for ya!" If it is important to play with you, they will find a way.

      Beyond that, you have way too much money to throw away. I would find more intelligent uses for it. Consider the parent post. Unless you own the building, and want to provide something nice for all your tennants, I wouldn't invest in much outside of your appartment. Encourage others to join you in going wireless to play together, but don't run wires all over a building that you don't own.

  • measure twice, buy once (Score:3, Interesting)

    by kwiqsilver ( 585008 ) on Wednesday February 04, 2004 @08:52PM (#8185417)
    To start, I'd buy a single 802.11g WAP and a single wifi card (preferably for a notebook). Plant the WAP somewhere central and walk around with the notebook and see what kind of link quality you get.
    You might also want to try connecting a server to the WAP via one of the ethernet ports (assuming the WAP has some) and do some file transmission and pinging as you walk around, to make sure your connection is clean. Or maybe do some test gaming against a machine connected to the WAP.

    If you can reach it from everywhere, good!
    Otherwise try different locations and try to minimize the number of positions required to cover every location likely to have a PC. Then you just need to get an 802.11g card for every PC.

    It must be a slow news day, when something like this gets posted to /.
    And a slower work day when I respond.

  • Make $15 million dollars with your $7000 (Score:5, Funny)

    by wan-fu ( 746576 ) on Wednesday February 04, 2004 @08:52PM (#8185419)
    Lots of people have given suggestions over the types of hardware to buy or other places to invest your $7000. Why not just reply to one of the many, many friendly people from Nigeria and use your $7000 as a transaction fee for a transfer of funds. You'll receive a good 30% of a $50 million transfer in funds, which is $15 million. It's a no-brainer!

  • Don't blow your money.. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Awptimus Prime ( 695459 ) on Wednesday February 04, 2004 @08:53PM (#8185422)
    "I live in a 4 storey building, and pretty much everyone in this building is into gaming and computers. I have just received, through the death of a great aunt, about $7,000."

    I would suggest putting that $7k towards your retirement. Invest it in a solid fund or IRA. This would be much wiser than blowing it on a technology that will be outdated in a couple of years.
    • I would suggest putting that $7k towards your retirement. Invest it in a solid fund or IRA. This would be much wiser than blowing it on a technology that will be outdated in a couple of years.

      Couple of years?? This shit will be old-hat in a few months. The guy with the $7k is obviously too stupid for his own good so his best bet is to flush the cash directly down the nearest hi-flo toilet bowl.
    • . Invest it in a solid fund or IRA. This would be much wiser than blowing it

      'wiser than blowing it? yes

      wise thing to do? not a chance.

      401K and other "retirement" funds are the biggest scam america has going by these banks..

      Getting a paltry few precent per year on your money while paying 14 to 28% interest on your debt.

      it is pure stupidity to save money when you are bleeding it.

      Pay off bills absolutely number one. Then learn about debt and how to use it. Credit cards are NOT NEEDED and the only debt

  • like everyone else says (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Indy1 ( 99447 ) on Wednesday February 04, 2004 @08:57PM (#8185470)
    wire it. Wireless doesnt handle a pile of users very well, espcially bandwidth suckers like gamers and what not. 100 meg ethernet is cheap, extremely reliable, and has a lot more bandwidth to boot .

    Keep in mind that wireless is x mbps SHARED, like the old ethernet hubs were, as compared to standard switched ethernet, which gives each port (and user) dedicated bandwidth.

  • two thoughts: (Score:5, Interesting)

    by CAIMLAS ( 41445 ) on Wednesday February 04, 2004 @08:57PM (#8185475)
    Um, ok, this is peculiar.

    1) Why would you spend that much money on setting up wireless in your appartment building for everyone? Unless you've already got a surplus of income, you own the appartment building, or you're into some sort of odd techno-charity urge addiction, I'd suggest you don't waste your money on something so frivilous: buy a house or pay off your debt, FFS! Hell, invest the money, if you don't have debt and don't want to buy a house.

    2) If in fact you are crazy or do own the appartment building, by all means, set things up to share internet access - at a (minor) to your tenants (either enough to cover costs, or to make a profit, you decide how nice you want to be). Personally, if it were me, I'd wire the place for ethernet (myself), provided the building wasn't too old (1970's). If the building was old and crappy, I probably wouldn't bother, and try and sell it off - though it would certainly still be feasable.

    You can choke wireless networks up pretty quickly, and they introduce needless security issues. For the cost of an 8-port (or 16, or whatever, depending on how many ports per appartment you put in) 100BT (or go GigE, the cost difference is negligible now) and a couple hundred hards of cat5, you can get hundreds the bandwidth/signal quality and many times the security of wifi. The cost would be similar, and could possibly be under $500, provided you didn't splurge and get a nice managed router to bridge stuff to the outside world.

    To be honest, though: I don't see why you even bothered asking this question. Are you not a geek? For me, the most fun of any project is the planning and getting things set up. You've got the resources of hundreds of thousands of knowledgeable people, after all: the Internet via search engine (WTF are you doing with an "Ask Slashdot", anyway? DAMN). The payoff of your work (ie, the planning and research) is the implimentation - to see how well you planned your project. What's the payoff if you have someone else do the research/thinking for you?

  • Be careful about your own liability (Score:3, Insightful)

    by joelparker ( 586428 ) <joel@school.net> on Wednesday February 04, 2004 @08:59PM (#8185492) Homepage
    If you build the wireless network,
    be sure you understand your liability.

    Like if a neighbor downloads too much,
    or uploads to Kazaa, or hosts a game server,
    does your service provider cut you off?

    Good luck... sounds like a useful project!

    Cheers, Joel

  • Experimental approach (Score:2, Informative)

    by dfranks ( 180507 )
    Nobody is going to be able to tell you how many access points you are going to need to cover the building without knowing what the walls are made of, how thick they are, and what the exact floorplan is (even with that information, it would be a guess).

    What you need to do is choose between 802.11B and 802.11G (I'd probably go B for what you have in mind). Purchase the following:

    an access point (not a router, an access point)
    a pcmcia or usb 802.11b adapter
    an omni-directional, high gain antenna for the AP

  • Everybody here who's recommending wireless access points are recommending one per floor. Why? Wireless access is measured by distance from the AP in three dimensions. I use my own AP on multiple floors where I live. Somebody directly below it could be closer than somebody on the same floor but in the corner.

    All in all, I think it's a waste of money and this guy's feelings are going to get hurt later on. Unless they're family or very close life long friends, why go to this expense and effort for them?
    • Overfootprinting gives better coverage and redundacy. In a building the same size as the one he describes on our system [utk.edu] we will put 8-12 aps. You have to take into account many factors. One of these factors is what the fucking building is made out of. If you are dealing with a stick built/gypsum board building, you get better floor-to-floor/room-to-room coverage. If it is steel and concrete, you have to take that into account. You've got 11 channels. Use them. Otherwise when one AP goes in the shitter, you
  • You should buy $7000 worth of a stock index mutual fund and add $2000 every year. Assuming you are about 20 now, by the time you are 45 you will have over a million dollars.

    An index fund invests in all or most of the stocks in the entire stock market, which has averaged a 17% annual gain since 1920.

    Instead of playing philanthropist to your gaming buddies, take care of yourself. Most of them are going to forget you exist in a few years. I'm going to turn 50 this summer, and if somebody had given me this ad

  • Wired "last mile", wired backbone... (Score:3, Informative)

    by LostCluster ( 625375 ) * on Wednesday February 04, 2004 @09:08PM (#8185570)
    The backbone of a wireless network is wired. Let's get that point out first in the discussion.

    We don't want the wireless access points speaking to each other by wireless... that's simply going to be too much use of the limited RF space, and we have to assume that people are going to want to use 2.4 GHz phones so we won't have all that RF to ourselves...

    My best bet would be a wireless access point on each of the four floors as close to the center of the building as you can place it, and then have those four access points have a wire all leading to a central 100mps switch that's placed wherever you can put it.

    The access points should be configured to not to speak directly to each other over RF, that's what the wires are for. Therefore, all the RF bandwidth is reserved for users, and hopefully they'll be running on the lowest power settings possible to speak to the AP on their floor and therefore with the lowest RF noise...
  • Keep in mind that if you set up this network, everyone and I mean everyone is going to be calling you whenever the internet connection is down or the network isnt working. Get ready for tech support apartment building.

  • $7,000?! (Score:3, Informative)

    by Sandor at the Zoo ( 98013 ) on Wednesday February 04, 2004 @09:13PM (#8185615)
    "Will $7,000 be enough?"

    Geez, I just hope we're not too late -- questions like this tend to get answered by shysters with "well, that's cutting it close, but I'll see what we can do."

    I have an 802.11g (Apple Airport Extreme if anyone cares) access point in my basement, in an electrical closet. I'm up on the second floor, on the other side of the house, and get excellent signal strength.

    Now, that's only three floors, and my house isn't huge. If your four-story building is large, you should still be fine dropping a single access point in the middle of the second or third floor, assuming you have a cable drop at that location.

    Worst case, you need two access points, and with the Airport, they can daisy chain one to the other -- one access point can use another access point for...access. I don't know about other brands.

  • Use that $7k towards a HOUSE down payment, and get the hell out of your apartment. The satisfaction and quality of investment you get from owning a house will be a lot better than the grief you get from trying to be a nice guy.
  • mod 5 browsing all says "don't do it"...for various reasons from getting sued to getting arrested for kiddie porn downloads. I have another don't for you...when you come up with a really cool, altruistic and geeky idea, don't post it to slashdot, it will get slammed.

    I had no idea /.ers were so negative
  • Nobody would blow $7 on wiring the building for his neighbors... My guess is that either he was hired to do it and doesn't know the first thing about it, so he's turning to slashdot, or that he's doing it with the expectation of charging his neighbors for internet access and making money off of them.

  • Why settle for Wifi-g? Go gigabit! (Score:3, Funny)

    by dokebi ( 624663 ) on Wednesday February 04, 2004 @09:39PM (#8185827)
    So you have a wad of cash you don't know what to do with? Want to spend it on something cool but don't have any good ideas? Not a problem. We see this kind of a problem every day, and we have a great solution. If you are looking to install a wireless internet setup, why not invest an additional $2000 and go gigabit wireless? But hey, since you sound like a nice guy, I'll give you a discount, and set it up for only $8000. That's a savings of over 10%! But you have to act quick. I can't offer these kind of rates for ever--we'll go out of business! So here is what you should do now. Put the money in a padded envelope, and mail it to:

    Tony's Construction
    123 Fake Street.
    Spring Field, MA, 18332

    And we'll come out and install it for you. Don't forget to tell us where you live!

  • An Actual Answer (Score:3, Informative)

    by routerwhore ( 552333 ) * on Wednesday February 04, 2004 @09:40PM (#8185844) Homepage
    The world of wireless is moving away from the unmanagable Fat AP model purveyed by Best Buy networks and even Cisco. The new kids in town are pushing centralized wireless with built in RF Site Survey tools, authentication, firewalls, IDS's and hardware-based encryption. The APs are really just dumb radios that download their configs from the switch when it boots. If you want some big boy toys (that will fit into your budget) take a look at Aruba Networks [arubanetworks.com]. We have used them in many apartment buildings and couldn't be any happier.

  • Blueprint... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Divergence ( 749258 ) on Wednesday February 04, 2004 @10:12PM (#8186070)
    Okay, I will assume you truely want a wireless network despite the good advice voiced by others.
    Since you failed to include any information like apartment building footage, a map/blueprint with your location marked, etc., this will be a general approach that assumes you don't want to leave anything behind when you move out eventually.

    1) Buy a WiFi card and an access point (AP) from your favorite company, but make sure it is at least 802.11g (D-Link comes to mind, since they claim near "wirespeed" encryption.
    2) Setup your AP (with WEP, largest key available!) in your room (which hopefully is near the middle of the building), and then walk around and see what your signal looks like. Make a rough map of signal strength and note any shadows. While you are at it, you might see if anyone else has their own WiFi already. (You might be able to enlist them in your endeavor!)
    3) Decide if you think you need to upgrade the AP's antenna to a larger "omnidirectional" antenna (6db or so. Anything larger than about 8db probably is a directional antenna) so you can reach the furthest recesses of the building.
    4) Build a Linix box that firewalls your ISP line, any wire-based Lan you might have, and the wireless AP! You need to protect yourself, or one of you new "friends" will hack you.
    4b) (optional) Setup an open source RADIUS server on the box and point the AP to it for authentication that is harder to break than MAC filtering + WEP.
    5) Decide which services you will let go through the wireless. Traffic shape (QOS) anything that might get abused but you still want to let through anyway. Make sure to include any game ports you plan to use.
    6) Decide how much of your ISP bandwith you want to let the wireless people have, and traffic-shape the interface card.
    7) invite a select few of your neighbors to try out the system (give them the shared WEP key or a Radius login)
    8) After you get their feedback and see how your network handles the load, decide if you still want to go through with telling everybody.

    Costs:
    ~$300 AP + couple of nicks from D-Link
    ~$100 New antenna for AP to boost range
    ~$400 linux box + 3 NICs
    $??? Your labor cost to set this all up

    If you find that the above single AP setup is not sufficient, I respectfully suggest you give up as a more complex setup is beyond a simple slashdot post. Hire a professional.

    - D

  • Roth IRA (Score:3, Insightful)

    by krs-one ( 470715 ) <.moc.smuroflgnepo. .ta. .civ.> on Wednesday February 04, 2004 @11:56PM (#8186752) Homepage Journal
    A few people have replied saying invest your money, which is a much wiser investment (rather than buying a wireless network).

    Invest in a Roth IRA. Investing $7,000 for 45 years at 10% interest (the average return rate, it takes ~7.2 for your money to double). Investing so, and not adding a single penny more, will accumulate to $510,233, a pretty hefty sum.

    Don't believe me? Go to this Roth IRA calculator [moneychimp.com], enter in 7,000 for the current IRA balance, 10% for the interest rate, and years until retirement as 45 years. Don't worry about the tax bracket as that doesn't involve Roth IRA's.

    Let your money work for you, not the other way around.
    -Vic

  • Seen this before (Score:4, Funny)

    by mr_z_beeblebrox ( 591077 ) on Thursday February 05, 2004 @12:23AM (#8186907) Journal
    Dear slashdot,

    Recently, due to a family death, I have come into posession of a large sum of money. For reasons that I can not explain I am unable to hold onto this money and that is where I need your assistance. My plan is to purchase wireless network equipment which I will use to improve the quality of life for my people (the other tenants in my building). Upon advisement from you, I will transfer the money to a computer supplier of your choice in return for the goods we decide on. You will receive nothing from this as it is not several million dollars and I am not an African Prince.

    Thank you

  • NAT administration is going to be heavy (Score:3, Insightful)

    by SethJohnson ( 112166 ) on Thursday February 05, 2004 @07:29AM (#8187885) Homepage Journal


    NAT is thrown around here like it's no big deal. And it won't be for simple web surfing and so forth. But when all these goofs want to use their p2p apps that require inbound ports to be forwarded to specific IP addresses...
    Oh my!

    The ONLY way to do it is assign static IPs to everyone. Then give everyone a range of ports and set the NAT to forward each range of port numbers to the appropriate IP. Oh, and if some of these people have multiple computers...

    Now you have a network admin job when you get home from work! Let's see them send that one to India

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