Creating a wireless high speed LAN over a large open area

[Sauber-C10]

This is my problem, i need to setup a wireless LAN in a large 3 storey office building, is there anyway of doing this without routing lots of ethernet cables all over the building & having multiple routers connected a central hub/switch or without using a ridiculous amount of wireless repeaters, also powerline is not an option here, any help is much appreciated

[KingLinkTiger]

I would suggest Access Points (APs), Repeaters, and Ethernet. Have one or two APs in your building, depending on the size of your building and the number of required repeaters you are going to want these to be fast, as in something like n900. Then you will have repeaters set up to repeat your signal, now be aware that these repeaters will use half the bandwidth to receive information and the other half to send it, so this means that after one repeater your speed will be cut down to 300. If also desired you can use ethernet cords to wire your repeaters to more repeaters or APs further expanding your range. If you want more specifics we will need a price range that you are working with, along with wither or not you are going to need and special items that would not come with consumer grade equipment.

[Whaler_99]

Recommend, if you are unsure, to engage a professional company. Many of them can do a site survey to find out just how much wireless gear you need for proper coverage. You will want to look more at high gain gear - high dB and power output. Also, make sure you get PoE enabled devices, saves you making sure there is a plug by every AP. Also, support multipple SSID? Can then make various connections and security levels... Maybe something with a centralized management solution, so one spot to configure everything?

EnGenius Technologies comes to mine. Also, SonicPoints by SonicWall (but you need one of their firewalls to manage). Cisco makes some pretty powerful gear...

It's not su much B versus G versus N versus whatever, but how many mW and/or dB is the signal - that provides the coverage... Course you want N were possible, but a lot of the higher gain items seem to use G - more stable over range sometimes then N...