howzit all

This question i'm about to pose is more of a thought experiment then something that is being done at the moment

In our town there are two WiFi companies, us and these other guys.
Well i happen to be friends with the network admin from that company and i while ago he asked if there was a way that they could rent space off of our towers.
Well our towers, we actually can't rent any space as we have our towers mounted on buildings that we had got permission to place them there. well while i was talking to my boss about this we came to an interesting question.
We may not be able to give them physical space on the tower but maybe they can share a virtual environment.

We felt that all we'd need to do was place an antenna on our tower (they use the 5.8 for their clients whilst we use 2.4 but we are also considering 5.8 for clients now as well) and have them use a virtual antenna off that. it was then that i realized, how the hell would i be able to pipe their clients back to their office and our clients to ours through the same network.

Your see we use OSPF on our towers and a 0.0.0.0/0 route for the traffic. the minute i start having to think about this new virtual network my brain goes squige.

we are thinking that if we can do this on out towers they could do the same on their system. in one quick swoop both companies has suddenly doubled the towers we can function off.

if anyone has any ideas it would be fantastic
I'm excited about this project, just because it seems such a complex idea

VLANs are one way to do it. It'll allow you to separate your clients traffic at layer 2, and then handle all layer 3 routing independent of each other.

If you have a large bridged network you'll just have to build the VLANs out in your switches from your core to your access layer.

If you're using a routed environment you're better off using Virtual APs & adding them to a bridge along with VPLS, EoIP, or GRE tunnels from your wireless APs back to routers on your respective networks. Let each ISP handle their routing separately. You could handle routing directly on the APs, but it may start getting complex with two providers trying to manage layer 3 routing in a single router. MPLS is a solution to this problem, but it has a bit of a learning curve and various network requirements prior to implementation which may be too much to worry about for this relatively simple issue.

Howzit

Just felt i'd close this off

I have been looking into this and have determined that if i was to try this i would need to break the network to make the changes and due to the supreme bitchy-ness of a lot of our client this is bridge i'm not even going to try cross that bridge.
Infact i have said to my boss that this cannot be done in our current position so that bridge has nicely been burnt so i never look at it again