Small Office Telephone System?

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Q. I am hoping to provide free wireless access to a low income retirement community consisting of 100 small houses located 50 - 150 feet apart. The terrain is extremely flat with only small trees, and the houses are all single level 2x4 construction, which seems to allow pretty good radio reception. But, I am also hoping to avoid the need for any tall antenna towers.

A. I have no experience at this sort of thing, but my early research has led me to a new company called "Meraki" that claims to make it easy to spread affordable broadband access. Their "plug-and-surf" concept appeals to me, but at $49.00, the Meraki does not appear to be the best (lowest cost) solution for my problem. It seems that their repeaters are relatively low power, probably resulting in a need for one Meraki unit per home, and possibly even requiring some outdoor repeaters. (Not only would this be expensive, it would result in a large number of radio "hops" to the most distance users.) Therefore, I am now hoping to find a higher powered solution that could achieve similar results with less radios. And, I have recently discovered the EnGenious ECB-3220 which claims to support "Wireless Distribution System (WDS)" at 400mW of output power. Could this be the right tool for the job? If configured properly, could multiple ECB-3220 devices provide a "Meraki-like" mesh network across the entire community that would allow shared internet access from a single DSL connection? (If necessary, I am willing to consider two DSL connections located at opposite ends of the community. But, I do not expect any heavy bandwidth demand. Just email and light surfing.) Do you think that an inexperienced person like me (with reasonable effort) could learn to configure multiple EnGenius routers to work properly in "Wireless Distribution System" mode? Would two units be enough to test both my network configuration skills and the "WDS" capability of these devices? At $119.00 each on Newegg.com, it seems that the ECB-3220 would be a relatively low cost solution, and I am tempted to buy a couple or more to experiment with. What would be a reasonable range to hope to achieve between units? (500 feet?) I assume that testing may reveal the need to mount some kind of an external omni-directional antenna on the roofpeak of each house acting as a repeater. Any suggestions as to the best antenna? By the way, I was thinking in terms of the EnGenius EUB-362 as the best wireless adapters for each end user in the community. Not good. Let's pretend you have a typical WISP (wireless ISP) system with 100 users. Rule of thumb is that such a system can support: 100 light email and web surfing users 10 business customers 1 file sharing user Yep, 1 user can saturate your system with their file sharing habits. So, you need some form of bandwidth control or bandwidth management. So, back to the typical system. Broadband loading is currently at about 10:1 or you can oversubscribe your bandwidth consumption 10 times assuming light users. You can look at this in many ways: 1. If only 10 users are on at one time, you have enough bandwidth to keep the phone from ringing. 2. If all your 100 users are on at the same time, they will get 1/10th the peak available bandwidth. 3. If each user is expecting DSL performance, you need: 10 * 1.5Mbits/sec = 15Mbits/sec backhaul performance. 4. If everyone gets online at the same time, 10% of them will ring your phone with complaints. Sure. It won't work, but you can do it. The problem is that such systems were intended for comparatively small office LAN systems. They don't scale well to 100 users. Neither do mesh networks or any other system that relys on store and forward repeating. The break point between a small "hot spot" type of system and a WISP system is about 25 users. To handle 100 homes (probably 200 computers), you should be looking at Cisco, Sonicwall, 3com, or similar vendors.

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