PCA Forums

we are going to put in a wireless system at the office on top of the wired system.

coverage will be for an area approx 50x150 ft. Construction of the office space is standard strip mall with drop ceilings and a couple of bearing walls. It seems pretty porous, signal-wise, since we can get a decent wireless signal from the flea market 2 doors down .

thinking in terms of a linksys g wireless router (replacing our current router) and a couple of repeaters

q's - would the security be ok on that ? do the repeaters have to be wired?


TIA

The repeaters do not have to be wired and using WPA would keep you pretty safe. But I doubt that you'd need the repeaters. I get a strong signal from my router outside of my home at about 150 ft away, and if you put the router in a central location I'd think you'd be fine.. Just my .02 though

GL!

eGo

Agreed, you won't need repeaters, and frankly repeaters don't work well. I'd try one good quality wireless G Access Point with TWO antennas (like the Linksys) mounted in the exact center of the office space, and (preferably) mounted to the ceiling. You'll get excellent coverage.

Later if you feel you have a dead spot then add a 2nd access point and mount them both on the ceiling each centered on half of the office.

If the boss doesn't like seeing the access points on the ceiling then mount them ABOVE the suspended ceiling - those tiles are transparent to RF.

I'd also recommend you use USB wifi NICs on your computers unless you've already got PCI ones installed. The USB Nics get better range.

thanks all!

I'll second the USB WiFi comment.

eGo

put in a linksys and all seems well. I get a weak but usable signal on the sidewalk outside the office so signal strength seems ok. used the first level of WPA encryption, that enough?

I would assume that's plenty.. We're using the WPA Personal here at the office.. just make sure you change the password on the router..

First level WPA is all you need HOWEVER if you want to be paranoid, since the WPA key can be brute forced by a dictionary attack by taking intercepted data home, use a completely random 64 character key.

WPA is extremely secure ASSUMING you use a strong random password. GRC has an online key/password generator for this here. Use one of these and you'll never have to worry about it. Needless to say, save the key in a text file somewhere:

https://www.grc.com/passwords.htm