Need Help with wireless in a very large home.

So a VIP in my company has asked me to setup wireless in his new home. He had someone come by to set something up but it wasn't setup in a great way.

The house is around 24,000 square feet. It's big with 3 floors. He pretty much wants the entire house lit up with wireless access.

Now currently, he has individual routers plugged into existing jacks all over the house. But, the person who set them up before hand made them all indvidual SSID's (which is ridiculous). So on 1 floor there are 4 different AP's.

Anyway, he wants to throw out all the old equipment and have me set everything up from scratch. Currently in the basement where the switch is for the house, Verizon installed a primary router/switch and that is what does the IP address leasing and each room in the house has a network jack. So, essentially I would just need to configure about 10 AP's with DHCP setup plugged into random Network jacks throughout the house.

Here are some things I need some help with understanding..

1) Should I just get small access points and upgrade the antennas?
2) Should I get 1 router for each floor and setup repeaters throughout each floor?
3) If I use just access points and not a router on each floor. Can I name each access point the same exact SSID? If so, how does it always show a strong signal strength? Will it automatically switch over to the stronger site when moving around the house? This is where I need some explanation.

I'm current a Computer Technician (so i understand technical setups)but have never really worked this extensively with wireless hotspots. I setup small house networks for family and friends with 1 router and 1 repeater but this is a HUGE house.

I'm curious to what my options are for the most effective network. What kind of equipment would make sense? I'm not really familiar with which brands are trusted for this type of setup.

Thanks for the help.

Patrick

yes, but you will want to use different channels on any one floor

if you use enough APs

this requires interaction between APs. it is not standard 802.11 behavior. this would be a proprietary thing, so all the APs would need to be the same brand. I would start by researching Cisco and Proxim APs. Guy has a house 30 times as big as mine can afford them.

Just to simply for I understand, every AP will have the same name and all the AP's on the basement should be set to (let's say) Channel 7. Main floor will be 8 and the upstairs will be 9? Again, all with the same SSID?

Edit: I found this nice article. http://expertanswercenter.techtarget...995841,00.html

I've been looking into Proxim and I have experiace in the field so I trust I can handle them. I've just never had much experiance setting up a wide scale wireless network. Honestly, I can just get simple AP's and scatter them around the house and setup repeaters but since he's not concerned about money, he wants wireless everywhere.

I really apperciate the response. I've been to another site and they pretty much were mean. Thanks again.

Like this:

basement, 3 aps from end to end: 1, 6, 11
1st floor, 3 APs from end to end, 6, 11, 1
2nd floor, 3APs from end to end, 11, 1, 6

assuming a rectangular shape, and assuming you need that many APs.

Im having a similar issue (obviously not in that large of a home) but i tried using a few different repeaters but they are very unreliable. (Hawking, Netgear powerline)

Let me know what you decide and how it works out