During our recent visit to Prince Edward Island (PEI, a province of Canada), I got to play with wireless repeaters. Good fun for an hour or so setting it all up. Details below.

We stayed here on PEI a week ago (Lyons' Cottages). In one of the cabins ringing that open oval shaped field of cottages. The property is long and narrow, about two football pitches or so, and too large to be covered by a single wireless AP.

The owners had wired internet in the office at the property entrance, but no wireless for the guests.

I asked if they wanted wifi, and they emphatically said YES, PLEASE!

So, we sent the owner's son into Charlottetown, to pick up three WRT54GL routers from a local vendor. Once we had the boxes, I upgraded them all to Tomato 1.28 and set about showing him how to configure them.

We installed one in the office, wired directly into their DSL router. It got set up as a DHCP client on the WAN side. For the LAN end, we used AP+WDS for wireless, WPA-PSK/AES, and we entered the MAC address of the second WRT54GL into the WDS parameters.

The second WRT54GL was then set up with no WAN, and as AP+WDS for the LAN side, with identical SSID/WPA/AES parameters. Ditto for the third WRT54GL.

On the second unit, we entered the wireless MACs for the first and third units into the WDS parameters, and entered the MAC of the second unit into the WDS config on the third unit.

The second unit was then plugged into power in a cottage up the hill from the Office, at the left end of the field, and the third was installed in a pump house mid-field. No cat5 wiring required.

EDIT: All of the units were also set to use exactly the same RF channel (11). The first (office) unit has the DHCP server function enabled, and the second, third (,fourth) units have it disabled -- their clients get DHCP from the first unit.

Within an hour of powering them all up, five of the twelve cottages were online and googling various things. Everyone else was probably still out on the beach.

Nice and simple.. no wires, easy config.

The kid actually purchased a fourth WRT54GL, so he'd have a spare. Just for fun, I got him to set up the fourth unit at the far right end of the field, linked to the third one. No hitches, no glitches, and still full 2mbit/sec internet access (the speed of their DSL connection). That's using four wireless hops!

Cheers

Nice work!
I was so intrigued by this concept a few weeks ago that I bookmarked the article I read about it.
Great to hear some success stories! I'll have to check my old router at home and see if it's compatible.

That's impressive - I last did this back in the days of the early Symbol trilogy kit, and it bogged down really quickly when multi-hopping.

Might revisit the idea with new kit and directional antennas - I have a specific requirement in mind for a hop of about a mile. I managed about 3 miles before, with Huber-Suhner 10db directionals, but my throughput was horrible.

I've been giving some internet sharing a tiny bit of thought... My cable provider has a nice 50Mbit (2Mbit up) option available now with unlimited monthly limits, but it's $190 (plus tax) per month. If I could share that with a few neighbors it might be a worthwhile package to jump onto. Ideally I'd set each of them up with a download speed cap so no one can stomp all over each-other's bandwidth. If I had this shared with 3 neighbors, I'd still have most of the speed available for my use.

Ouch, still only 2mbit up with that kind of download link? Thats worse then my 22:2 split.

At this point, I want better upload speeds more then I want faster downloads. Files download quick enough for me currently, and streaming works great. Uploading large files (such as offsite backups) is painful, and something I have to ensure only runs at night where it won't impact the connection. If I hit 2mbit up, my downstream shows a pretty big hit, and latency goes way up for things like Skype.

Heh. You go on vacation to a cottage on the shore, and what do you do? Network setup and troubleshooting for the cottages.

Hope you got a free night or two out of it.

The method used by that article demonstrates the simple "universal repeater" mode of DD-WRT. It has the advantage of working with _any_ primary AP device, but does require a second, separate SSID for the repeater. No seamless roaming from one to the other.

Handy, though -- I have two "Blanc" branded routers here (paid less than $20 each, four years ago), that also have the "universal repeater" function. Useful.

Using AP+WDS mode, as I did in PEI, requires that all devices be nearly identical. But it has the advantages of using a common SSID and channel for all devices, showing up as a single AP in the wireless tab on most software, and seamless roaming between the APs -- the user only sees a single, huge, access point covering the entire property.

Cheers