Which Access Point to Buy?

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KarFai

Limp Gawd
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Dec 14, 2001
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Well, with in the next few days, I will be moving from my dorm's to my Fraternity house, and currently we have 19 people living there, running on a 802.11b wireless network on some old linksys gear. They've told me it's very unreliable, and we will have 40 people living in the house next fall. Given that I'm the most tech savey, and have done cable installation and network administration before, I've taken it upon myself, to fix the issue.

We have a 3 floor house, with a basement (it would be nice to get the basement wirelessly, but not an issue to me.) It has about 30 rooms or so. It's older, has plaster walls if that helps at all...

My question is do I go with some consumer brand Access Points like say Linksys, and put one on each floor? Or should I go with an enterprise class AP like the Cisco Aironet 1100 802.11 b/g, and just put that on the second? I was looking at this on CDW,

http://www.cdw.com/shop/products/specs.aspx?EDC=558313

what solution would you think of? This isn't like a mission critical thing that needs absolute 24/7 uptime, but I need something reliable, that'll last atleast 4-5 years.

Also, if I just buy access points, I want to limit the access to only MAC address that I set, I can do that through the router, to the outside network correct? I plan to use WEP Key's as well. I'm fairly new to wireless networking, however I'm reasonably confident in the wired arena.

Thanks.
 
30 rooms in a 4 floor house? Guessing you are on the east coast?

30+ hosts on one AP is pushing it. You'll easily saturate the bandwidth available on one channel. You'll either want to use 2 or more APs or an AP with dual radios (use seperate channels of course 1, 6 or 11). If your plaster is over lath you could get away with a 2 radio AP, but if your plaster is over wire I'd suggest using two seperate APs covering different sections of the house. Remember though if you want a functioning ESS you'll want APs that have some sort of inter access protocol. AFAIK IAPP support is pretty weak on home networking products.

If you want to go cheap I'm pretty sure that Linksys's APs have a proprietary IAPP available, but you might want to look into APs by Demarc, Senao or Cisco's Aironet which have much better specs as far as transmit pwr/sensitivity are concerned.
 
The Midwest Actually, up at Michigan State University. I would preferably, not want to go with Linksys, After reading your comments, I was thinking about a pair of Cisco Aironet 1100's with the b/g standards. This is what I was thinking about:

http://www.cdw.com/shop/products/default.aspx?EDC=558313

385 a peice isn't too bad, and I think I should be able to swing that. Now, what I want to know is, if I'm just using these 2 AP's going to a router, then out to the internet, where would I be doing the MAC Address filtering? I only want certian MAC's on the network, so would that happen at AP level or router level? Do you think this is possible, and if so would those AP's do it? I appreciate all the help, thanks alot.
 
KarFai said:
Now, what I want to know is, if I'm just using these 2 AP's going to a router, then out to the internet, where would I be doing the MAC Address filtering? I only want certian MAC's on the network, so would that happen at AP level or router level? Do you think this is possible, and if so would those AP's do it? I appreciate all the help, thanks alot.
Click to expand...

I havent used these Cisco's specifically, but MAC address filtering is done on the Access Point itself. Remember than an AP acts like a big hub for wireless clients, so if MAC filtering was done at the router, then that's still leave the computers on the network vulnerable. Since it's done on the AP's, clients with incorrect MAC's dont even get on the wireless network at all, much less out to the internet.

Also bear in mind that MAC filtering is a good first step, but it is not fool-proof. MAC addresses can be faked with many cards so while I would encourage you to use it, I would also encourage you to layer your security and enable WEP/WPA as well.
 
I plan on WPA or WEP as well... becuase it is a large college with 45,000 undergrads, alot of people steal other people's internet... so at the very least MAC address filtering is a must. I thought it was on the AP it's self so I guess thats a plus.

Also, anyone who has used that particular AP, can you give me your opinions about it, and if anything else like a specific brand and model you'd recommend instead of the cisco stuff.

I'd really appreciate all the help you guys can provide.
 
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