Wifi tecnology is good or connecting with hubs and switches are good...?

Question

i want to interconnect 500 pcs in a hostel and 300 pcs in a lab in the same place so the students can access the lab resources from the hostel room. so to implent the network between this is wifi is good or connecting with hubs and switches are good? please help..

Answer 1

If it's possible using switches is the better way, as they are faster.
Or if it's too cumbersome, have a combination of both. I would assume that in the lab, there would be more usage - so install switches there.
And in the hostel, if the students have wireless then they can use WiFi, it won't work too fast, but, it's easier to setup.

Answer 2

You need to use switches for your main connection for the sake of speed. If you set up ALL your internal equipment with 10/100/1000 switches and cards, then at the hostel use wireless access points you get the best of both worlds. The wireless equipment can NEVER handle more than about 30 connections, this is a limitation in the wireless. So for a 500 pc network you would require about 17 or 18 access points. This may need to be more if the construction of the building reduces signal strength of the wireless. An alternative would be to cable the hostel as well, giving users the choice.

Answer 3

You are talking heavy duty.
A wireless router is set up to handle 250 users at once generally by default.
I do not know if you are thinking of total users or total users online at a moment.
Your biggest problem will be adequete internet bandwidth especially if some start to download songs or do more than simple browsing.
A router has more electronics than a switch ( switching hub)
and will act as a traffic cop of the network.
A router do have switches built in .
It is true that a pure switch is faster than the switch built into a router yet some device is going to have to interface - does the data stay inside the local area or does it go outside to the internet .
How does data from the internet get to the right computer in your network.
You might try to have redundancy of a couple of wireless routers with the same ssid ( name of network) and same security settings BUT set on diffirent channels.
I am told this works.
I wonder what happens in the middle when the ip may bounce between the two signals but apparently if seems to work- i guess in most cases the wireless card catches the more powerfull signal and the person has difficultiy connecting they move until they don't
You can still have wired connection ( wireless routers have both)
The beauty of wireless is that it allows you to simply set up the network without additional problems such as the wiring and has convenience.
You might want to look at a Linksys router that can be updated with 3rd party firmware to give more power and advanced features for setting up a wi fi hotspot.
There is one version of the firmware upgrade done exactly for that. The older linksys wrt54g routers are what is used.
The new ones cannot be used. Linksys sells the older version (Linux based) as the model WRT54GL

Answer 4

For the lab I would definitely go with a wired network if it is feasible. Wired connections are much more reliable and are also faster than the ubiquitous 802.11a/b/g standards (with the exception of wireless "n" which is still in draft). Theoretically, you will get up to 100Mbps with a typical wired LAN setup or 1Gbps if you use gigabit LAN. Wireless a/b/g can get you up to 56Mbps but then you have to contend with signal reception. You would have to go with business grade switches/hubs since it would be inefficient to try to connect that many computers with typical consumer hardware.

For the hostel I would go with a wireless access point to your wired lab network. It is easy to setup and by using DHCP anyone can easily connect to the network. The major benefit is that you will not have to physically connect each computer to the network and users with laptops can easily join.
However, it sounds like you are trying to setup a large number of permanent machines. In such a case wired is perferable, again if feasible.

Answer 5

I would offer both, some will want the speed and reliability of a fast switched network, and others, especially in a room, will want the flexibility and mobility of wifi.

Obviously wifi is the easiest to set up, wiring can be a pain. If it's already wired than it's a piece of cake, just add enough 48 port switches to support the number of wires, and add a bunch of wifi access points to get enough geographic coverage.

Answer 6

Gigabit switches are nice and quick. Wifi could be used, lot's of hotels do this. Just make sure the devices you end up using support this number of concurrent connections.