Thinking wifi beam (is that the correct term?) and how it would be implemented. I'm yet to ascertain whether this can actually be done but I'm working it through the slow moving vehicle that is my brain.
Would it be, say, Office A's wifi is beamed into Office B and presented via an AP as an alternative wifi network in addition to the wifi/modem/router already present in that office. Or feed that wifi beam into their switch, removing their adsl wifi/modem/router, so that Office A's wifi beam is now the only network available for Office B and Office A's adsl is the only connection to the internet for both offices?
The correct term here would be a
wireless bridge. Here's how to think of it:
You would typically need two wireless antennas/APs, one at each site. These APs are configured to communicate with
only each other. This is done one of two ways:
(a) through WDS by putting the MAC address of the other AP into each one's config. This method makes the wireless connection/antennas completely invisible to the outside world and the backhaul issues WDS has won't affect things here due to there only being 2 antennas involved.
or
(b) through AP/client mode which works much like a router/laptop would. One antenna acts as an access point with a hidden SSID, encryption and, if desired, a MAC filter to prevent anything that isn't the other AP from joining the network. The other antenna acts as the client. This method is dead simple to set up but there will be a "hidden network" visible to anyone sniffing the wireless waves.
Both antennas then connect into each locations respective LAN. So your network would typically look like this (forgive the rudimentary text diagram):
SITE A <<<|SWITCH|____(cat5)____|ANTENNA A|---------------------------------wireless---------------------------------|ANTENNA B|____(cat5)____|SWITCH|>>>SITE B
That's a basic way of how to do it, you can think of the bridge just like a long cat5 cable. You can manage internet access at each location with VLANs or, if they want to drop internet at a location you can also just pipe in through the antenna connection like you mentioned, though you may run into bandwidth issues internet-side by doing so unless they have a pretty solid connection.
