[Tiffany Mac]

Background: I would like the entire house to be able to get a wireless signal. The problem is that the base station only goes 150 feet. I will need 2, possibly 3 base stations to cover downstairs, upstairs and the backyard.

Speed: Cable Modem.

My thoughts: Place cable modem in basement. Split cable modem by Router. The split wires go to each room in the house. (i can then hook up the 2 desktop computers in their respective rooms). In the north eastern most room and the south western most room put the base stations. (question is if you can split the cable modem signal by a Router and put two base stations on it, will it still work).? Maybe they need their own IP's? Then have the third base station near the backdoor for the outside access.

Assumptions: Assume that the house is large enough to need this. Assume that we have wireless computers. Assume i'm not crazy.


Setup? How do you set up multiple base stations on the same internet connection? What's the best way to go about this?


-Tiffany

[MPC]

Not sure about the set-up question. Could something like this help?

http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPL....27.8.3.7.13.0

Might be a cheaper solution.

[Tiffany Mac]

I guess the real question is: Can you have two base stations sharing the same cable modem connection?

[aaanorton]

What you're describing is called roaming. It enables you to walk around with a laptop and connect to the base with the best signal on the LAN. A lot more info on this is available in the Networking forum.
Basically, you've described it correctly. You may need to add a hub or two in there to increase the number of ports. There's an issue about the channel number of each BS, I'm not sure if they all need to be different or the same. They all do need to be named the same thing (tiffany's parent's wild roaming LAN, for instance). Why would you want to hard wire "each room in the house", though, if you're going to then blanket the neighborhood (state?) with wireless? I could see adding a couple wired jacks, but no need to go crazy with both. This can be done with any wireless AP that supports roaming. You may want to shop around for these. I believe the AEBS (I'd get the one with the external antenna jack) does this, but you could probably find others that cost a lot less (you might want to get one of the AE, though, so you will have the USB printer sharing port). Look at Asante and Netgear stuff.
Are all comps OS X? Will you need AppleTalk? Do you have any networkable printers to add?

[Tiffany Mac]

I guess i wouldn't hardwire every room. Just the ones where the computers are.

I suppose the real question still is: can you set up multiple base stations on the same cable modem line.

All computers are running OS X
I will be sharing a printer for the wireless users.

[aaanorton]

Originally posted by Tiffany Mac:
I suppose the real question still is: can you set up multiple base stations on the same cable modem line.

All computers are running OS X
I will be sharing a printer for the wireless users.

YES!! You can do this. Again, it is called roaming. You can "roam" from base station to base station, all on the same LAN (with the same subnet even), sharing the same cable connection. All comps will be networked together as well. Go to an Apple store. Their stores have wireless access in and all around them. Ask to see their router set up. Yours will be very similar, but with less clients.
What kind of printer(s) would you like to share and what kind of connections do they support?

[Art Vandelay]

AirPort Extreme also supports bridging. This means that only one base station needs a physical connection to your LAN. The other stations can "bridge" to that station wirelessly to extend the range.

[Tiffany Mac]

This 'bridging' concept: how does the base station do it. Obviously it can send out the signal, but you're saying it can receive the signal as well?

I wasn't aware of this

[Agasthya]

Originally posted by Tiffany Mac:
This 'bridging' concept: how does the base station do it. Obviously it can send out the signal, but you're saying it can receive the signal as well?

I wasn't aware of this

Yeah.

Its new for Airport extreme. Watch the MWSF keynote when Jobs introduces Airport extreme, he briefly discusses it.

[Phanguye]

Originally posted by Tiffany Mac:
This 'bridging' concept: how does the base station do it. Obviously it can send out the signal, but you're saying it can receive the signal as well?

I wasn't aware of this

basestations can obviously recieve signals otherwise they wouldnt be able to recieve requests from your computer...

a couple of points... if you just put airport cards in your 2 desktops that will save you the trouble of having to hardwire them. you will also not have to purchase a router this way.

I would just put airport cards into the desktops and plug one basestation directly into the modem. then just set the other basestations up and bridge them from the original base station

[Tiffany Mac]

I didn't want to make the desktop computers wireless because i wouldn't be achieiving maximum speed capabilities.

Since wireless only goes at 54mps
i would rather get the 100mps

[[APi]TheMan]

Originally posted by Phanguye:
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist

Suffocation?

[Phanguye]

Originally posted by Tiffany Mac:
I didn't want to make the desktop computers wireless because i wouldn't be achieiving maximum speed capabilities.

Since wireless only goes at 54mps
i would rather get the 100mps

yea you really arent going to notice teh speed difference there on your small network

[Xeo]

Linksys wireless routers have greater range but are still 802.11b (my mistake, they have g now.)

But to do what you want, you'd have one base station connected to the cable modem and it would give out the LAN IPs. The other base stations would simply pass the DHCP request from your laptop(s) to the one passing out IPs. That's the only configuration you really have to worry about... making sure that only ONE base station is doing DHCP, and it's the one on the cable modem.