My first Wireless Distribution System setup

The company I work for was asked to provide a Wifi solution for a little known hideaway place just under an hours drive away. The place in question is out near Sherwood Forest and has a reception which is basically a converted wood lodge and then a few wood lodges. That's really all there is to it!!

Anyway we were asked if it was possible to install an Access point on the reception and then install client devices inside the lodges themselves and housed away out of view. We were sceptical it would work and our scepticism proved to be correct! As I mentioned earlier it's at the edge of Sherwood forest which meant there was no shortage of trees around! At this time of year the trees were also in full bloom (which is good from a surveying point of view) and being Britain the trees were wet! Now Wifi uses RF and RF does not get on well with water!! So our initial survey doing it this way was a failure. We did hold the devices outside the cabin after confirming no signal inside the cabin and some that were close enough to the reception with a reasonable line of sight did manage to get one bar of signal strength but it was never going to work like this!

We suggested that as the park was going to expand that an ideal solution would be to build a lattice tower and mount an access point with a 360 degree high gain sector aerial that could be viewed from all the lodges (present and future). However customers being customers wanted it installing sooner which meant there was not enough time to build up the lattice tower. So it was decided that as a lot of the lodges did have line of sight to each other (including one near the reception that houses the Internet router) that we would mount Ubiquiti Nano locos on each lodge and set them up in Access Point WDS mode. Then internally we would have indoor TPlink access points that could all be mounted behind the TVs out of sight.

Before going to site I had a plan of the park and had to plan which Access Points would talk to which Access Point. I had 15 Ubiquiti Nano Locos to program so I drew on the map which loco would point where and how many MAC addresses would be needed for each Loco. For Access Point WDS mode on these devices you can list up to 6 MAC addresses of other devices that it will talk to so I had to plan this carefully.

The above diagram roughly shows how they're setup. As you can see this isn't ideal as some Locos are responsible for a lot of connections even if they aren't on their MAC list so a failure of one Loco could take down half the parks Internet access. But despite this it does work and works well.

Cabling worked very well as we used one power supply with a splitter that fed a PoE injector for the Nano Loco and another PoE injector for the internal access point. A small 1/2 meter Ethernet cable then joined each PoE injector via their respective LAN ports. All this is mounted inside the lodges behind the TVs so are out of sight and don't affect the internal aesthetics of the lodges.