Has anybody set up a Cellular front end (LTE or 3G) access to the Internet and a WiFi backend supporting 150 devices.
I need to provide temporary Internet access (7 days) to a convention center room that is about 2000 square feet.
Stooopid Aria wants to charge $50/user/wk and who knows what the BW is.
My advice have some limits or controls. Whether it be a box running QOS,
hotspot, etc. You will have users on there running speed tests, trying to
Skype, etc.
Justin
cradlepoint, verizon lte wireless usb dongle and a commercial plan with the appropiate bandwidth cap.
I would then put a somewhat more powerful wireless-ap/router/nat-box behind it.
I have stood up a datacenter behind such a thing while waiting for circuits to arrive.
the cradlepoint can leverage more than one dongle if you have them.
joel
so : Cradlepoint with 3 x USB Modems -> Cisco2900 with integrated WLC and 6 AP's
plus overage fees 
If you have the luxury of running copper, you have some options. In my
experience, its often difficult to do so without paying the house's labor
at a convention center. This may necessitate a distributed solution with
just several individual cradlepoint routers dropped throughout the coverage
area wherever you find power.
Otherwise, what you say above should work, as long as the required NAT
implementation on the cradlepoint to do the 3x load balancing doesn't die
under load. I've only tried up to about a bus-load of people on a single
unit, which worked fine. (FYI -- with 1x modem per cradlepoint, they have
a way to pass the public IP to the Cisco 2900 via DHCP pass-thru and not
run NAT on the cradlepoint).
Finally, Cisco also sells a 4g LTE expansion card.
so : Cradlepoint with 3 x USB Modems -> Cisco2900 with integrated WLC and 6 AP's
sounds like something that I would do yes.
would probably extend the modems with a usb cable and or have more than one provider on a different band plan
so that the three cellular devices aren't right on top of each other
Or find a wireless ISP in the area to backhaul you some bandwidth for a
week.
Then just get a box to do NAT, DHCP, etc.
Josh
Do you think the convention center that wants $50/person/week will just give away the roof rights for free?
Hi,
so : Cradlepoint with 3 x USB Modems -> Cisco2900 with integrated WLC and 6 AP's
Alternatively, but I am biased as a pfSense developer, you could setup pfSense with multiple usb 3G or 4G sticks.
pfSense has firewalling, some QoS, a traffic shaper and limiters. And the firewall rules can give you granular control over which traffic goes where. The limiters are really useful in my opinion, we use it at work to prevent us from DoS ourselves.
https is a bit of a issue since you need to direct that out 1 connection, most https sites seem to have issue with sessions moving across IPs. A local proxy server is often a good idea, or run it on the pfSense box itself if it is beefy enough in transparent mode, although that will complicate load balancing.
If you also need IPv6 you need the 2.1 BETA, you can use NPtv6 to load balance traffic over multiple tunnelbroker tunnels (each bound to a 3G stick) using a single LAN prefix. Same as with the https example above, use the 1st real prefix on the LAN and NPTv6 load balanced connections going out the other.
I'd say this costs a few hours to setup and test, no idea what your budget is. Your are probably going to spend quite a bit more time and money on getting good wireless coverage on both bands. 2.4Ghz is awful, 5Ghz works amazing for unobstructed view, or per room if you will.
Best of luck,
Seth
Brandon Ross wrote:
Or find a wireless ISP in the area to backhaul you some bandwidth for a
week.Do you think the convention center that wants $50/person/week will just
give away the roof rights for free?
There is a legal issue of who owns the right to control radio
bandwidth usage in the convention center.
For licensed bandwidth, it is obvious that licensees have the
right.
Though it is not so obvious for ISM bands, it should be reasonable
to assume land owners have no right to prohibit visitors to transmit
in ISM bands.
For example, land owners should have no power to shut down PAN
by ZigBee.
At least, that is the formal understanding of regulators in Japan.
Masataka Ohta
Watch out for the terms in the contract. You might be obligated to use
the conference facility's service as opposed to bringing your own. An
alternative might be to check in with ShowNets (http://www.shownets.net/)
who are very good at custom-sized solutions and are often at least
tolerated by facility operators.
-c
I know nothing of the legalities outside of the US, however I never said anything about the convention center restricting irghts to use RF, I said they won't let you on the roof without paying a lot of money. I strongly suspect that is true of all convention centers everywhere.
It's not uncommon for people to circumvent these problems by pointing antennas at windows from the inside. Can require some strategic room booking to get the right line of sight.
Joe
I suspect the amount of fade glass will provide would make this a last resort solution. Unless you did a 900mhz point to point with some yagis. I can't think of a reason you would have to provide data, most people have 3/4g to begin with. If it's for booth ops, I would think that cellular router would be the best choice. Most of the times our booth rides our private satellite network, so we just deal with the latency. If you could live with 800ms rtt, get a vsat.. 
I suspect the amount of fade glass will provide would make this a last resort solution. Unless you did a 900mhz point to point with some yagis.
I suspect the general answer is you do whatever you can to make things work.
I can't think of a reason you would have to provide data, most people have 3/4g to begin with. If it's for booth ops, I would think that cellular router would be the best choice. Most of the times our booth rides our private satellite network, so we just deal with the latency. If you could live with 800ms rtt, get a vsat..
The original question (IIRC) was how to provide conference-style wifi with no wired back-haul, so given that I presume that the option "don't provide conference-style wifi at all" does not meet the requirements 
Joe
[...]
I know nothing of the legalities outside of the US, however I never
said anything about the convention center restricting irghts to use
RF, I said they won't let you on the roof without paying a lot of
money. I strongly suspect that is true of all convention centers
everywhere.
I managed to get a rooftop link in for free at a convention center when
other methods were failing. I was impressed, but I'm sure it'll never
happen again.
For how many people, doing what? I doubt very much that 3G will have
close to the bandwidth you require, and I'm not at all sure about LTE.
--Steve Bellovin, https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb