Bridging access points vs. 2 normal access points 1

[icaro2020]

Hi,

I'm looking for a wireless solution for out 2 level office. I've been doing a bit of reading, but don't understand what the benefit would be of getting 2 wireless access points that can bridge and repeat vs. getting two non-bridging, non-repeating access points and installing one on each floor. Can someone clear this one up and advise?

thanks!

 

[bcastner]

The advantage of repeaters is that you do not have to run wire.

My preference would be to to use wired repeaters. In fact my preference would be to purchase WRT54G wireless B/G routers from Linksys and use them as APs.

 

[icaro2020]

So in my case, where I have 2 floors with wires, there is no advantage in having bridging repeaters, right? This would be more useful between one building with wired and a on building without wires, right? Thanks

 

[bcastner]

You got it.

There are other differences as well. Often wireless bridges are used to take a wireless connection and bridge to a wired point such as a switch. On a large campus setting it might make sense to use wireless APs to do a "one to many" repeat of the signal to other APs.

Wireless APs that are acting as repeaters have a bandwidth cost, as half is used to communicate with the originating AP and half to repeat the signal to clients. On the high-end of this you can find Repeaters with two radios to lessen this bandwidth hit.

In your situation your could either use Access Points, wired to a switch on your existing network; or since the cost differs little or none, purchase wireless routers and use them as Access Points. It is generally true that the wireless routers outsell the APs by a wide margin and receive more attention in firmware updates and support.

A Linksys WRT54G wireless B/G router generally can be found for less cost than the WAP54G, and it has had repeated firmware updates to handle issues such as WPA support. The WAP54G has not seen a firmware update in quite a while, and does not support WAP at present.

A good article on how-to use a router as an Access Point is this recent one from Tom's Hardware Guide:

http://www4.tomshardware.com/network/20030716/index.html