At the moment I have four towers. Each has a 5.8ghz feed and then a 2.4ghz relay down to fixed station clients. I provide hotspot services in some area's and pppoe for fixed wireless stations. I have another business in the area that are currently using a cell provider data network and wish to switch to me if I can provide seamless roaming. And I'll need to add about 15-20 towers in order to cover the entire county.

Is WDS on each of the 2.4ghz links what I'm looking to do?

Do I use one routable subnet for all wds stations? And if so do I use only one hotspot and dhcp servers?

What happens to the 5.8ghz links.. or rather how should they be utilized?

Do you want them to be able to roam across your network with public IP's or do you want to give them a private IP scheme, kind of like a hotspot, except only for them?

I'm not sure what your current set-up is so I'm not sure which way to suggest you go.

The 5ghz back bone link is normal routable ip address, and each 2.ghz client side link also are using routable ip address as well. Each are setup on there own subnet.

I am guessing I would use one large set of ip address such as a /24 and all 2.4ghz setup on the same ssid. Then one router would handle the pppoe or hotspot autentication and all 2.4 clients setup for wds? But don't know how to set this up and don't know how I could off-load the traffic to the 5ghz links either.

-Michael

I would set up all your clients using user manager on a centralized router. Then I would create new "routers" on user manager and enter all your towers IP adresses. Then, at your towers, set the security profile to radius authentication and point it towards your central router.
Another way would be to register your clients mac addresses with all your APs. Kind of the long way to do it, but...
Also, set all your towers to the same SSID and put them on WDS.

Another way to look at this is that your towers will act as "transparent bridges" and all dhcp / dns and AAA will be conducted by the central router.

You are going to need at least a 333 or the new 600 series. Wow. Good luck with that and let us know how it works out.

Assuming you have your own public IP space and your customer is getting a public IP to roam on your network with but you are not using DHCP.

5Ghz backbone from access point back to your core.

2Ghz set as AP bridge, same channel, same SSID, WDS to other 2Ghz in range, bridge through.

This will get you up and running, if you want to use authentication or you use DHCP then you'll need to use authentication, but this will work without authentication as long as you statically assign the IP per customer.

There are other methods as well. You can use hotspot, put a Virtual AP on each of the 2Ghz with matching SSID and bridge that to an EOIP tunnel back to a central hotspot controller at your core then the customer can log in to the VAP and they will get a DHCP address from the hotspot controller (10.5.50.X) amd they will be natted through the controller using only one of your public IP's. Youc an also use MAC authentication so they don't have to log on, the controller will recognize the MAC address and pass the traffic. Youc ould use this scenario and set up several VAP's on different hotspot controllers and have several customers with roaming abbilities.