Wireless Router for our temporary office - anything special?
 

We have five wireless users (notebooks) and three people that would like to use the wifi on their cell phones (because the cell reception here isn't great).

I guess at any given time we would have as many as seven devices using a single router.

Does this require anything special in terms of higher capacity wireless router, faster speed, etc?

Thanks in advance.

FWIW - we are in a Regus building (they have already given us permission to run a wireless router), and we are all very close together (distance is not a concern).

Sam

I don't think you really need anything special for just 8 connections. If you were talking 20+ I would suggest a more industrial strength router. I think just a solid Linksys would do, that's my brand of choice at least, always seems to be the easiest to setup and maintain. Just make sure you password protect it when you get it, especially if it will have business files on the network.

Some people might suggest a custom firmware, though if you are tech savvy don't bother with that as you probably wont notice much a difference.

Higher capacity, faster speed?

I assume that you are talking about Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi is Wi-Fi and is a fixed amount of bandwidth. Generally, that bandwidth exceeds the bandwidth. In a perfect world, 54 Mbit/s is the deal....which is still a lot of bandwidth.

1) Get the Linksys WRT54GL or the WRT150N routers; 150N if you have any clients/laptops that have n-draft. These run for about $60
2) Load up DD-WRT or Tomato on the routers. It's a simple process but check the manuals on how to do it of www.dd-wrt.com
3) Configure as you like...

The chances are the dd-wrt or Tomato will have way many more options that you need, but you can specify priority/Quality of service, block or restrict certain services (i.e. P2P), allocate more bandwidth to certain machines, etc.

The key with the freeware DD-WRT or Tomato is that its much more stable than the generic firmware, and best of all it is free.

i wasn't sure if a router i would use at home for one notebook computer would be compromised from a performance perspective with eight devices.

so, i guess my question re: capacity was if a "normal" router would be able to accommodate eight wireless devices simultaneously.

it seems that i am all right.

thanks for the responses, and i will also look at the free firmware mentioned by pred02.

thanks!

The answer is YES. But there isn't anything you can do about it (sans changing to different technology). And it shouldn't be significant enough to make a difference.

do phones with wifi use any significant amount of bandwidth?

the problem is that neither t-mobile or att work particularly well here, and three of our phones can use wifi. will we see significant improvement in call quality, or will the phones be affected by the fact that there are five computers and three phones using the router?

i'm not nearly as concerned about the internet speeds on the computers.

thanks again!

You won't be able to use the WiFi connection for voice calls on the phones, with a very small number of exceptions. Most phones with WiFi support have it to provide a data connection, as an alternative to the mobile provider's data service.

What sort of phones are they?

i can tell you that my experience has been 100% contrary to your statement.

we had NO cell service at our home (no voice, no data), and my fiancee used her blackberry with wifi for both voice and data after we installed a home wireless router and configured the phone to our home network.

t-mobile has 17 phones listed with "Wi-Fi and Mobile Calling" featuring unlimited wifi calls (4-5 different blackberry models).

Wi-Fi and Mobile Calling* Effortlessly switch between Wi-Fi calling and T-Mobile's wireless network while you talk Get great coverage at home when used with a T-Mobile HotSpot @Home wireless router Unlimited nationwide calls over Wi-Fi, at home or at any U.S. T-Mobile HotSpot

fwiw - the t-mobile router is not a necessity as we used a standard linksys router at home. there's nothing special about the t-mobile router at all i don't think.

I use my T-Mobile Blackberry Curve 8320 UMA mode on my home Wifi Network with zero problems. I threw in a couple of configuration tweaks in advanced media settings for the DD-WRT, and it works like a charm. Never a dropped call.

The most likely bottlenecks for your users will be:

A) WAN bandwidth availability beyond your router
B) Contention for that WAN bandwidth between your users.

Money (to Regus, I suppose) solves the first problem.
The second problem can be addressed partially by following pred02's advice in posting #4 and tuning QoS parameters within the GUI.

If they are UMA capable phones sold by tmobile, then they can be used for voice calls over WiFi. AFAIK, AT&T WiFi phones only support data.

Generally I like to separate the WiFi function from the router. This allows me to upgrade the WiFi portion without bothering the router setup. So this is my setup:

Modem
Public IP address, DNS address holder.
This makes the carrier responsible on things they are responsible for because the modem is their equipment.

Router
Gateway and DHCP server, hardware firewall, VoIP functions

WiFi AP
Security such as WPA2-PSK

This seemed complex but actually very stable and promote reliability by reducing the thermal profile of each box. The WiFi box gets changed frequently as new technology is introduced, about once a year. So it went from 11g to MIMO Pre-N to Draft N to Draft N plus gig-E all in the span of a few years.

This had eliminated the wife calling while I am on a trip and telling her to power down and reboot the modem and router to get internet back.

Good point about T-Mobile - hadn't realised this service was still active. I thought I had read about a year ago that it was dropped.

Interesting to hear that it works relatively well...

I have Comcast at home with about 15mbps (down)/2mbps (up) for about $40. Before that I had ADSL (4mbps (down)/1mbps up), and god I wished they had FIOS in my area but they don't. On my wired and wireless network I have about 6-8 devices attached including a file server, two desktops, a laptop, SlingBox, satellite reciever, BR player, Philips Skype phone. I track bandwidth usage on my LAN and WAN and really do not encounter any issues with utilization on my home network.

DD-WRT lets me manage QoS very well so even if someone is downloading a large file it does not disrupt the crucial services (like VOIP-Skype). I had some issues with UMA and Skype initially, but after changing the router settings just a little bit I was able to resolve them with no disruptions in service. The entire network took less than 1 hour to set up and it works like a charm.

I agree that this is the proper way to do it, but considering you can pick up an older Linksys WRT54G on eBay for about $30 bucks, it is more cost effective. That being said, I do have a Netgear gigabit switch in my structured media closet that is used for the internal wired LAN that is also connected.

I also thrown in another Linksys device (WRT150N I believe) as an additional access point only to spread the coverage of my wifi network so all areas of the house have a full signal.

The best thing about this UMA/Wifi service is that you can be abroad, disable your network connection and enable Wifi and you can recieve and make unlimited calls to the US for about $10/month (T-Mobile Zones or whatever its called). It really works very well, and this UMA thing is one thing that T-mobile does very well (I wish their 3G offerings were better, but hey). If you have UMA on all your office phones and make calls from the office, then you can elimiate the phone bills as UMA calls on the $10 are unlimited.

More info on UMA and UMA phones:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unlicensed_Mobile_Access