Wireless Service Providers → Karlnet with +200 people, 3mbps inet, PROBLEMS!

In the North Texas area, we have a conglomeration of cities, in about a 10 mile area, and we are running Karlnet. We have a total of 6 towers, and some hotspots, sharing the same router and bandwidth, and now we are seeing major broadcast storms, and are needing to find a way to consolidate these broadcasts into each area. What we are executing right now is an all routed system, the Karlnet APs running the router, and we are planning on routing all the way to the towers and using their routing capabilities only. We also do have a Canopy area off of this, but it does not seem to give us a lot of broadcast problems, but they do not have routing capabilities in their AP. What I need to find out is in this reconstruction of our network, how people would execute this correctly. What equipment would be recommended for a router, needing limited space, for this one canopy area?

The current network construction basically consists of Cisco routers, Trango backhauls, Canopy and Karlnet APs/customer CPEs (RG-1000, AP-1000, EZBridge, Bromax), Mikrotik bandwidth management system (to be replaced after this change to a Dyband system), and a Bay Networks BLN2 head end router. We are running NAT on most customers through the BLN2 as of now, because a Cisco 2600 could not handle the NAT load for all of the customers.

All comments will be welcome on how to execute this change. We are really needing the help, as it is only 2 people making all these changes, and we plan on documenting all of these in the end for other problems that people may experience in the same situation.

Thanks!

Personally I would put some kind of router at each tower. In an ideal world each AP would have a separate ethernet port on the router to limit broadcast storms and traffic. You can then implement traffic control at the hilltop rather than the head end.

If you're using AP-1000s with Karlnet I would worry that you might overextend their limited processing power by trying to make them the router, plus your aren't covering other devices that should be routed as well (Canopys for one)

My recommendation would be routing switches either Riverstone or Cisco. They can gotten off of E-bay for cheap.

The mentioned above really works well, its pretty much the same way I'm pushing my network.