I am hoping someone has some experience with creating a large wireless mesh or city-wide wireless. Being that the good commercial Access Points are in the several thousand, we at work are wanting to build our own access point and have Linux on it that we can configure and manage it with. I can get a industrial board designed to be used as an access point with cpu and memory on it for less then 200 bucks. With the daughter card it would have 4 mini-pci slots, which you can use to put the mini-pci wireless adapter card in. Here is the product site of the mini-pci wireless adapters which have pretty powerful radios: http://www.ubnt.com/super_range.php4 I was also then looking at a outdoor enclosure that has a fan and heat as well. I was then going to mount it on TowerMast: http://www.antennamast.com/products... , and then mount a high powered omni-directional antenna on it as well. The first unit I want to build I would put at home and test it out. I would only use one omni-directional antenna then. For what we are wanting to do at work, we are wanting to have three antennas. Two directional site to site antennas which we want to use to connect to other access points 20 miles away and then one omni-directional antenna to service everyone around it. So here is my question then, are we crazy thinking we can sell internet at broadband speed using only a "single radio". I have heard of using a "dual radio" in which that would not suffer from as much traffic. Anyone have experience in setting up this large of a wireless network? Thanks all for the help! Jesse

Putting aside the hardware issues I suspect you are going to run into some serious regulatory hurdles as "Private" radio transmissions at frequencies used by PC NICs (and cordless telephones) are severely restricted in the power level they are allowed to transmit. This is why wireless Hotspots are just that. Small limited local spots with open wireless routers. Even the large telecommunication companies have not perfected wireless broadband but they have literally $billions to invest. They make extensive use of existing cellphone infrastructure (towers as close as a few miles apart. What you are trying to do with two transmitters 20 miles apart and a $200 investment. Well if it works you should contact the telecom giants and offer to sell them the plans for a coupl of $M I used to have a signature but it disappeared and I just couldn't be bothered writing another so please feel free to ingore this.

Hi Richard, We have in the past connected two companies via wireless 20 miles apart. I wasn't envolved in the setup but it envolved two cisco access points with a high gain directional antenna. We are wanting to program the radios with the linux distro. For example say you have 3 access points, one directional antenna on access point ("B") will connect to access point ("A") while the other directional access point will connect to access point ("C"). In Madison they have actually quite a few somewhat city wide access points all buy different companies on the wireless b or g network and have you log in via website for access to the web. Yes, there is a TON of interference though, I couldn't even setup our own home wireless in my Dad's appartment in Madison because pretty much all channels were being used and there was a ton of packet drops. I have been doing more research and I am finding that using multiple radios is the only way to go. If not you are running at only half duplex anyways. I have been trying to google search for linux software that can take advantage of multiple radios. So far no luck finding anything other then a couple companies that is using linux to do this same thing but have wrote a custom app for it.