Hello

Need some advice please.

I look after a setup with 4 x AP800's set up in a mansion, 2 on the top floor and 2 on the ground floor in a square shape. The 2 AP's on the top floor are connected back via CAT5 to a switch where a 2820 resides. The 2 AP's on the ground floor are wireless and connect in a wireless WDS chain back to one of the AP's on the top floor (2 x WDS bridges set up between 3 AP's). The aim is to simply have 1 large wireless SSID where every device can see each other regardless of where they are on the network.

Is this the best way to set this up? At the moment only one of the wired AP's is set up for WDS bridge and the other is set to AP mode. Should I turn both of the wired AP's into a WDS bridge so that the wireless AP's can connect to each of the wired AP's for more resiliance (3 x WDS bridges on each wireless AP) or is this just increasing traffic? I am unable to set the 2 wireless AP's on repeater mode as devices will be patched into the LAN ports of the wireless AP's as well as having wireless devices connected.

The other thing im unsure about is what channel each AP should be using. Some documents say for WDS to work, SSID, encryption and channel should be the same and some say they should be on seperate channels :-S

Thanks for reading!

If you can get each AP800 connected to the 2820 by cat 5 thats best as each WDS hop cuts the wireless speed by half! Even the first one. So the third one in the chain will have 1/8 speed! Also I found WDS was not 100% reliable.
So ideal is 4 AP800s in Access Point mode connected to the 2820 by cat5 with same SSID each one, Each AP should be on a different channel so 1, 5, 9, 13. Also need to take into account any neighbours using those channels and use a channel for the AP nearest the neighbour that is as far away as possible from the neighbours channel.
If you have to use WDS then those APs using WDS must be on the same channel, all APs still use the same SSID.

Thanks for clearing this up Howard

Unfortunatly it's not possible to get CAT5 to 2 of the AP's, hence why I had to set up WDS. I was unsure if I would get better coverage using one of the AP's in repeater mode but it seems to be working ok for the time being.

I did try and set up a WDS between a 800 and 700 but gave up after an hour and guessed it was down to compatability?