[CS-FSLUG] outdoors wifi

[Tim Young]

Cool.  Hope it goes well for you.  Glad you are thinking both about 
wifi and content filtering...  :)

*WIFI coverage:
*With Wifi, there are a few considerations.  Most soho (Small Office, 
HOme) wireless access points have a limited number of simultaneous 
connections (some devices, as low as 32 connections). If you get 
higher-end WAPs, you can get a lot more people connected to each device.

So you need to come up with a balance of enough wireless access 
points scattered around and big antennas.  You can put a nice tower 
somewhere and attach a powerful antenna and have full coverage for 
your park, only to find that your WAP cannot support all the 
connections.  But scattering 20 different WAPs around can be expensive.

*Content filtering / Captive Portal:
*If you have multiple WAPs, it will be easier to manage the content 
filtering / captive portal on one device instead of doing it on a lot 
of different WAPs.  I would recommend a pfSense with Dan's Guardian 
or something like that that has a little more horsepower than a WAP.  
When you get a lot of people surfing / streaming at the same time, a 
WAP starts to slow down.

You can do opendns filtering, which I used to recommend a lot more 
readily than I do these days.  It is a pretty effective filtering 
solution and very easy to set up and manage, but is probably pretty 
expensive for what you are trying to do.

     - Tim Young

On 9/5/2012 10:46 AM, Mark Clayton wrote:
> My wife and I are buying a campground (Lord willing). Two of the four
> we're looking at already have good wifi. For the ones that don't what
> hardware do I need to buy to have decent wifi around the park? Let's
> assume the park sits on 60 acres, roughly shaped as a square. The
> office is located in one corner. Any ball park figures on hardware
> cost?
>
> The hardware is the more important question. But as for software, I'd
> like to use open source. Is there a recommended set of packages or a
> good pre canned iso? Obviously I need router s/w but I'd like to have
> captive portal and content filtering included. What else should I have
> running?
>
> Thanks,
> --
> claytoncapers.blogspot.com
> www.mark-clayton.com
>
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