Multiple routers in one house?

[md99]

My folks own a B&B and lately they've been getting a lot of requests for wi-fi from guests.

They have their own business computer hooked up to a wireless router but the B&B is a four story building and an old one at that. The walls to each guest room are solid concrete and over a foot thick so understandably the wireless signal isn't exactly what you would call a wireless signal.

I thought that I might be able to get three of these - http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=NW-081-BE&groupid=46&catid=1595&subcat= hook them all up to a four way adapter in my phone line, do a small bit of drilling, place one securely on the landing of each of the three floors, configure them and supply a decent signal for guests use.

Is this possible and if so, is there anything I should be aware of?

Thanks.

 

[Mattus]

You can't connect more than one ADSL modem to the same phone line - but in this case you don't need to. You don't need extra modem routers - you just need wireless access points. In theory, you'd connect them to the existing router via ethernet, going through a switch if you run out of ports.

In practice, though, a bog-standard router as supplied by an ISP may not be able to cope with dozens of simultaneous users. Even if it could, heavy usage will bring your internet connection to a crawl if it's not especially fast. I'd recommend using something rather more robust than the typical home router, preferably with the capability to completely separate the guest network from your own network, prioritising your own traffic. I don't know what router that would be, but I'm sure someone else does.

The other thing you should think about is that if it's a standard domestic broadband connection, making it available to guests at a B&B might well go against the ISP's terms and conditions. And you're responsible for any dubious content downloaded on your connection, so some content filtering might be in order.

The bottom line is that this is simple to do, but trickier to do properly!

 

[Corasik]

Lets pretend you have a "business" grade ADSL, and that your ISP has no problems with shared connections. (Plenty of business use home connections and just fail to notify the ISP.. generally its fine at least until the day someone rings for tech support)

What you need to do is hard wire an ethernet Cat5 (or better if you wish) network onto each floor of your B&B, and then on each floor simply place a wireless bridge. Your existing router will handle DHCP, DNS etc for everyone on the network.

If you cant phyically wire up ethernet for the bridges to use, you can always achieve a very acceptable comprimise by using Homeplug "powerline ethernet" solution. Even the slowest homeplug is just about fast enough to share an 8meg ADSL, and if thats not enough there is homeplug 80, and homeplug AV(200). Just remember that you cant use a surge protector with homeplug, as it will basically filter out most of the signal and give you very very low performance.

All in all, the Cat5 (or cat6) wired ethernet + bridges will give the best performance.

Most ISP supplied routers will be cheap models, but virtually all of them will be able to support DHCP, and at least 100 or more computers connected. Of course the more people share a broadband the slower it may get. You may well wish to implement firewall rules on the router, and disable fileshareing. Or you could just go the whole hog, and set a general denyall rule, and then permit http(s) (ports 80, and 443) SMTP email (25), pop3(110) etc. You can always add additional services to the firewall if guests specifically ask for them.

 

[vsmora]

Just to clarfiy for the OP, when the above poster says to get a "wireless bridge" these devices are more commonly referred to as Wireless Access Points (WAPs). If you search for "wireless bridge" you'll come across wireless client bridges (for connecting a single wired device to existing wifi) and wireless point-to-point bridges (for linking 2 wired networks together via wifi), neither of which are applicable to you.

Anyway, for your question I say nooooooo don't do it. There are lots of things to think about in order to safely provide guest access. For starters:
- legal liability for what the guests do. If your ISP contract doesn't specifically allow sharing, then they will hold you responsible, irrespective of any disclaimer you obtain from the guests.
- penalty costs or flat disconnection if/when the ISP finds out
- disruption to the biz if a guest e.g. spams and gets the connection blacklisted from sending any mail for several days
- bandwidth management if one guest is hogging and no-one else (inc the biz) have enough left to do anything useful
- how to protect the biz systems from malicious sw/users. Whilst you may not be expecting any hackers to come stay for a weekend, keep in mind that most users don't know their PCs are infected with active malware.
- how to log, identify and block specific bad users/PCs

Some of the above can be solved e.g.
- multiple routers to seperate guest and biz traffic or a premium router supporting port-based VLANs
- wifi client partitioning
- QoS and throttling in premium router
- dedicated 2nd internet line just for guests, pref on a contract that allows sharing
- PC based logging
- per-user authentication (e.g. captive portal)

Depending on how many simultaneous guests you'll have, I'd suggest either:
1) Renting out individual PAYG 3G dongles. Manually record who has which dongle and when. This way theres no impact to the biz network and its easy to work out which user used a particular offending SIM. Easy to replace the SIMs if one gets blocked.
2) Outsource it to a 3rd party who will handle all the infrastructure, security and liability, while giving you a cut of the revenue e.g. The Cloud
3) If you must do your own wifi, then buy decent kit (bundle-grade consumer routers won't cut it) and get a pro in to set all the security and management up properly

 

[md99]

Bloody hell, sounds complicated (for me at least). I appreciate the answers but all this talk of hardwiring, Cat 5 and what you have simply may aswell be in Chinese to me

I have considered some of the other options suggested (we did rent payg usb dongles but unfortunately had them taken or guests simply refused to pay for wi-fi).

My brother did mention going down the homeplug route but doesn't each laptop have to be plugged into each plug? Are there wireless homeplug packages available (or does the technology even exist?)

 

[Corasik]

Just use the homeplugs to provide the "ethernet" required for the wireless access points. My ancient 802.11g access point was boxed/retailed as a bridge, but whatever the name, its just a device with a lan port, and a wireless radio for joining wireless and wired networks together.

But gosh, you have a point, I just googled for homeplug wireless, and right away found 80meg homplug, with built in 54meg wireless. Looks perfect for your needs imho.

If you go down the route of carefully setting up your routers firewall, so that basically guests can use email, and web browsing only, then you should find it is fairly easy to prevent people hogging all the bandwidth, and will limit any comeback from your ISP as well.

I doubt that most guests would complain if the "free" wireless network access around a B&B didnt allow fileshareing, gaming and other services anyway.

 

[matthab]

I hate to say it but BT FON is the best way to do this. They will pay you back for renting out abit of your connection I beleive.

All info is here: http://www.btfon.com/support/faqs
Or if you want a more professional solution use openzone: http://www.btopenzone.com/partner-zone/index.jsp

This means you still have adsl and none of the issues associated with users being naughty. Also they wont be able to see your networking equipment and hog your bandwidth.

 

[md99]

I hate to say it but BT FON is the best way to do this. They will pay you back for renting out abit of your connection I beleive.

We're not UK residents so that really isn't an option for them. Been speaking to my brother (he's a web designer) who served his time in AOL and various other ISP call centres and he recommended these for the simplest hassle free solution.

Said he'll take care of the router configuration, bandwidth allowance and so on. As long as I'm not dragged into it I'm happy