I have a potential client that is a 10 story hotel with the first two levels 25,000 square feet for meeting(huge). The current company that supports the hotel owns most of the infrastructure. They are on there last leg. They own the switches, T1 lines and the access points. The hotel is furious with this company and wants them out and that is where I step in. They currently have on 7 AP for the two floors with many dead spots. I have supports many meeting over the years at this hotel and the wireless has never been right. This is my big moment. I have done my homework and have several friends that are WAN guys. My questions is as such:

I need to setup a guest access network! My partners and I are going to use a lease program with Cisco and have looked into the BBSM, NAC, WLC

EoS/EoL for Cisco Building Broadband Service Manager 5.3

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/...d805aeb23.html

Cisco NAC Appliance

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/...d802da1b5.html

Cisco Wireless Lan Controller

http://cisco.com/en/US/products/ps6397/index.html

and will use Cisco 1240 access points with higher gain antenna.

There will be a max of 1200 users wireless online simontaneously and from what Cisco has told me only 24 wireless connection at time is the amount that each access point can handle.

What the hotel wants is when a guest connects his laptop to their network they will be redirected to a webpage that will charge them a fee for wireless access to the net.

They ultimatly want all the guest rooms wireless along with the meeting area downstairs. Can someone point me in the right directions. I need help!

i'm getting more and more wary of answering your threads as i feel more often than not i never really quite give you enough to go on... but in this instance you've not actually asked a question at all. what's wrong with this? I assume you're interested in doing it open source or similar? if so there's certainly things like chillispot which an provide a lot of what you want.

The NAC market in general is very new, and it can be very hard to actually know what "NAC" even means... it's really very very vague and one vendorfs solution can look very different from another. one solution that i was quite interested in when they managed to get into our head office was consentry, who do a number of clever things with packet inspection at a layer 2 level. as such you don't have the requirement to have a layer 3 seperation between different security levels, which makes a layer 3 architecture painfully simply. at 1/8 of the Cisco cost too. never tried it, but i'm sure there are other things doing similar stuff...

Cisco AP's also never seemed like that good a model. we use symbol AP's which use a different model to the cisco ones. with Cisco each AP is it's own entity and whilst they chat to each other they requrie seperate configs and maintenance. the symbol equivalent uses a single bad ass AP, but has antenna modules which connect to teh AP like a normal switch and run how ever many hundreds of metres from the AP device. so you have genuienly one device to manage but with 48 antennae placed wherever. also cheaper i believe.

acid_kewpie, you kick !#!@!@!@#. I am always grateful for your responses. I know that you are from the UK and wanted to ask you about sputnik.com. This is a company from what I understand that is very popular in Europe and has appliances that do guest access service but this potential customer is a huge hotel so I dont want to take a chance and screw this up. I will look at chillispot but as far as the equipment for the hotel do you know of any diagram that I can maybe look at that would steer me in the right directions as far as equipment is concerned. I looked at the cisco website and found some items but very vague. thanks

really depends what level your pitching things at. sounds like your customer should be paying for a high level solution, which can be done in many ways. what i'd probably suggest is getting to appreciate each step in the solution, authentication, routing, client isolation and then look to see what products can cover each element. as is so often the way it's a case where a lot of things will do 70%+ of everything you want. but if you can't cover that remaining 30% with another 70% application, then you're likely to end up with amismatched solution that can be quite at odds with itself. if you were looking at chillisoft, then a potentially interesting angle is using it via OpenWRT, where you can use a huge range of very generic AP devices, initially the Linksys WRT54G of course, and run chillisoft via them. i'd assume there's a reasonably simple scalability method the'd use to make a diagramatically very simple architecture which could look a lot like somethign cisco would propose.

Obviously a key thing is to remain totally professional. open source projects are great as we all know, but if it's going to cost you in terms of functionality, administration by them etc... it's not always somethign that can be justified, even in line with a financial saving.

never heard of sputnik myself, i get lots of people pushed in front of me to varying extents, but never come across them yet.

personally i have some work orientated interest in this as well as general background interest, so i'll probably be happy to dig around any proposals you have, but still, don't forget i'm just a chancer too... only doing my CCNA ICND next friday...

I need to step it up myself. I only have half of the LPI 1 and an old A+. I am just one of those people who has been in computers for years but never went after the certs! Good luck on the CNA!