Can an office in the same building connect to my wireless LAN if they also have a wireless LAN
and are within broadcast range?
Stations
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on a neighboring wireless LAN can accidentally connect to your wireless LAN unless you
take appropriate countermeasures, such as unique SSIDs, shared key authentication, and enabling WEP
with different keys. But I'm guessing your question is really the inverse: how can you let a
neighboring WLAN send traffic to your WLAN?
Depending upon what kind of wireless LAN access point you both use, you may be able to configure
one AP in repeater mode and
the other AP in root mode. The AP in repeater mode acts like a client station to the root AP,
relaying traffic to/from stations on the neighboring WLAN. According to the CWNA Study
Guide, this configuration isn't very attractive because the footprints of the two APs must
overlap considerably (for them to reach each other) and the repeater AP is doing double-duty, which
reduces overall performance for that WLAN. Companies that have multiple APs usually enable
inter-WLAN traffic by bridging traffic onto a common Ethernet linking root APs instead. In that
case, you'd want the APs to have the same SSIDs and WEP keys so that stations can roam freely
between them.
This was first published in June 2003