Hotspot ISP with seperate internet connection at each site

[clearwave]

Good day,

I am looking at setting up a sort of "hotspot franchise", which I would offer to coffee shops and other various locations.

Reading the the FirstSpot topologies, I noticed that if you want a multi-location solution, users have to connect through a router, and eventually authenticate to the Advanced edition of Firstspot, which has one internet connection behind it.

Now this is great, because as the system grows, you just increase your bandwidth where the server is situated, except what happens trouble hits...

I am suggesting that a seperate computer, with an internet connection, and a "Lite" version of Firstspot is intstalled at each coffee shop, and when the user connects, Firstspot Lite uses the internet connection and Authenticates on the Advanced version.

This would make roaming much easier as well, because it doesn't matter where the user goes, their username and password is all authenticated at one place, and if the coffee shop's internet connection next door goes down, it does not affect all the sites.

Think this will work?

[alan]

Sencerio 2 : Distributed Network Topology ( see http://www.patronsoft.com/firstspot/topologies.html ) works very similar to what you describe. I suggest download a trial try it out.
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[csclark]

Hi Alan,

I understand how the Distributed Network Topology works, though what I am proposing is an option for a seperate internet connection at each site.

[alan]

For Scenario 3:Centralized Network Topology, yes you need to increase bandwidth accordingly as the system grows.

But in Scenario 2:Distributed Network Topology, FirstSpot will communicate with the centralized ODBC datasource for authentication only. The actual traffic does not need to go through FirstSpot.

BTW, thank you for your suggestion. We did think about your proposed architecture briefly in the early phase of the development. It is a bit more complicated since we need to maintain 2 versions. Still, I would like to hear more opinion from you.
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