How can I set-up a single Wireless SSID with several access points?

Question

Notice how several large college/university and business campuses have a single SSID network throughout the entire community? Local to me, the City of Mountain View, California has a city-wide system that is operated by Google!

I want something similar in my large home - where there is more than one access point, but a single SSID that is shared by all the access points.

Wireless access point manufacturers, such as D-Link, tell me that my only options are different wireless access points with different SSIDs or a wireless repeater (which repeats a signal, so also reduces signal strength and speed). But this is obviously incorrect as numerous places have different access points that share one SSID. How is this done?

Answer 1

They use wireless access points, which are connected to a switch via ethernet cable.  You can accomplish the same thing with repeaters, wireless routers that have 'bridge' mode, or you can use something like dd-wrt to mod the routers to add the function.  Wireless access points would be overkill for you, they are designed to provide maximum bandwidth to up to 20 concurrent users, and they are expensive.