I am trying to setup my apartments with free open wireless across the entire complex (10 buildings in a circle), and I need advice and opinions on which routers, and antennas you guys think I should use?

I want it to be an open wireless g network, perhaps with the capability of using WPA encryption in case the other neighborhoods start to leech off the little cable internet connections we will be using. I plan on hooking it up to one cable connection at first and seeing how well the entire neighborhood would deal with that bit of speed, then if it stays too slow being hogged up by some kazaa lover, maybe adding more routers and more cable internet access connections.

I want this to have the ability to be firewalled, but it will be open at first. If I see music sharing I will firewall it as I do not care to have my apartment complex sued for breaking any media sharing laws. Not to mention if some kazaa user is hogging all the bandwidth, I want to be able to stop or limit it.

Thanks to everybody who helps me out!

Difficult to advise without understanding the distances involved, the layout of the buildings and where you need wireless coverage.

Normally, we would do it something like this...

Building (1) Wireless cable router (with built in firewall) - providing local wireless coverage. Then from an ethernet port on the router, link it to a wireless bridge. The wireless bridge then connects to ...

Building (2) another wireless bridge with an Access Point plugged into it which provides local coverage. ...and so on.

Use Wep encryption to prevent unauthorised use.


[Edited on 26/8/2005 by wifi-support]