A friend of mine owns a guest house and wants to offer wifi based internet to his guests who tend to be business users with laptops. The trouble is that the building is 150 years old and has 12" thick brick walls throughout.

He needs some form of wireless gateway he can install to cover the entire building. I know it's a tall order but i've heard you can get wifi systems with repeater units to strengthen the signal. Does anyone know about these from the point of view of reliablity and performance? He needs to cover 4 Large ensuite bedrooms on each of 2 floors, a sitting room, dining room, kitchen/office and a basement flat.

Apart from coverage, i'm worried about the speed dropping once several users are connected to the internet via the wifi network. Does having a repeater system help overcome the shared bandwidth issues associated with a shared wifi network?

My Belkin wireless gateway covers my house and garden no probs but its only an average semi so it wouldn't be enough and I don't think it can't work as part of a repeater system.

BTW

There is a Cat5E Network point in every room including a store on each floor. These are linked back to network hubs/switches on each floor. These are in turn served from a DSL router on the ground floor. I did the electrical designs for the refurb of the building a couple of years back so I made sure the data/telephone cabling installation was as future proofed as the budget would permit.

Any help would much appreciated.

basic way: plug in a wireless access point into a wired socket on each floor: repeat as needed for full coverage. will do the job. speed will drop as you share bandwidth across all users, but for a smaller job probably not too bad: if it is, you'd need parallel infrastructure going back to something to loadbalance.

if you want to be *really* flash and have web browsers automagically divert users to a login page (i.e. sell access etc) then check out nocat via google.

ric

basic way: plug in a wireless access point into a wired socket on each floor: repeat as needed for full coverage. will do the job. speed will drop as you share bandwidth across all users' date=' but for a smaller job probably not too bad: if it is, you'd need parallel infrastructure going back to something to loadbalance.

if you want to be *really* flash and have web browsers automagically divert users to a login page (i.e. sell access etc) then check out nocat via google.

ric[/quote']

Yep , a few cheap access points will do the job.

If you want it to be really posh with forced login pages then some of the 3com kit will do this for you but it won't be cheap (or easy to get working right)

Cheers guys that's basically what I thought. He won't be charging extra for internet access as this is a top dollar B&B with 4 poster beds and Jacuzzi baths etc. He will be using encryption and changing the password periodically. He will also make everyone who wants to use the service sign a disclaimer.

We do similar for the Jurys Hotels in UK and Ireland. I'd recommend putting the Access points in the corridors (out of reach), the amount depending on a wireless survey (take a wireless laptop and an access point and see how good the signal is from each location)

Gimme a ring if you need advice when fitting.