Site Configuration Questions....

I am looking to setup a Canopy system around my neighborhood. I want to deliver both to residential and provide a wide-area hotspot. To give you a bit of topology:

The setting is a 3.2 mile roundish lake with heavy foilage around the perimeter. There are public areas up to 75 up from and along the lake, and houses across the street. Heavy suburban area.

Backhaul mounted about 150 feet above the lake on a hill that has a 180 degree (or more) of the entire area I want to light up. However, the heavy foilage prevents me from doing 802.11b really effectively.

I want to setup a canopy system and blast to a 6 AP cluster from the backhaul which is directly across the lake. Then that would broadcast back out to all the homes and people around the lake.

My questions to you smart and helpful folks is:

1. Will beaming across 2 miles of water be a factor?
2. Can I put some smart bridge 802.11b devices, connected to an 900mhz AP, to broadcast in 802.11b around the neighborhood? Too much cross talk?

any ideas on that?

Not sure about the water. You may have a problem with reflections (multipath). You should probably use some sort of software (ie. Pathloss 4.0) to generate the path profile using the proper antennas and locations to see where you may get reflections.

If you get your antennas in the right places to account for the reflections, what happens when the wind picks up and the water surface starts to move? Your reflections chages as well.

You could build a diversity system, using two separate parallel links and switches that support spanning tree on each end (you would need spanning tree to avoid the “loop” you would creat with the two links). Or you could use some other method to create that redundent link. That way, when one link goes down due to any reason (let say waves on the water) the other like takes over automatically, assuming it is not affected like the first one is.

802.11b operates at 2.5 GHz, so you will not have any problems colocating it with the 900 MHz Canopy.

Aaron