Several people have asked me how to build lower cost municipal Wi-Fi systems that cover anything from a very small area to hundreds of miles. To be honest, we haven’t yet deployed a muni Wi-Fi network that covers hundreds of miles, but in the course of my work as a wireless ISP over the past few years, I have learned many lessons from our small and medium-scale deployments that may be useful to people who are thinking of rolling out large scale muni Wi-fi projects.

As a wireless Internet Service Provider (WISP), our smallest system is 15 clients and the largest system is about 270. I have designed and managed systems that handled up to 3000 users per day and supported about 30,000 users per year through pay per use servers. My designs are based on systems installed and deployed over the last several years that typically didn’t follow the standard cookie-cutter models. Since then I have engineered mesh systems for public safety and municipal utilities for video surveillance/analytics over 100 square miles, Major League spring training baseball facilities, traffic systems, airports, city facilities, point-to-multipoint (PTMP) WISP systems, and point-to-point (PTP) links up to 1Gbps. The proposal I set out below for a city-wide system is based on my experience and the lessons I learned with these systems and concepts.
Basics of a municipal Wi-Fi network

A municipal wireless network is basically a bunch of hot spots connected through some type of wired or wireless backhaul system using a cluster of Access Points (APs). The net