Setting up wireless internet to 4 rental units?

Question

I'm in the process of buying a 4-family home and want to provide wireless internet to my tenants. The cable company wants 4 separate accounts each paying the full monthly price for internet access. Can't I just get one account and hook it up to a wireless router to provide for the building? If so, is there one router better than others for handling a potential four users at once? What else should I consider?

Answer 1

definately possible to set it up wirelessly but you may run into range and bandwidth issues depending on how big the property you wish to cover is and what your tenants use the internet connection for

Answer 2

You have a few choices. If you want to provide internet connectivity, I would stay with a commercial class router.

You will spend less time playing I.T. guy and more time on collecting money. You will also have more options in the commercial lines. You definitley want to have the ability to control or track certain aspects of your Internet. An example would be if downloading music and movies is illegal where you are, the movie/music nazi's will come for you since you will be account holder. You will want to point out that its not you and show them logs of who and which computer was doing it. Its just to protect you and for no other reason should you log. That was just one example. There are many more to give you reasons to use a commercial class router. You might even want to try to use a firewall based router.

My top 3 companies on the lower end:

Watchguard
Sonic
Engenius

I hope this helps, good luck

Answer 3

Yes you can hook up as many computers wirelessly to the wireless router as you want. The problem would be the signal strength through floors and walls. Wireless 'N' is the strongest out there for home use. Brand names are your preference, or you can do some research on-line. Plus you can buy 'repeaters' to amplify the signal where ever you need it. You are a nice landlord to provide such a service.

Answer 4

Most if not all your residential WiFi routers will support up to 255 users. Get a Cisco Linsys Router and some external antennas and buy one Internet connection.