Question : Wireless access in very large house

I have a client that is moving in to a very large house (McMansion) and they want wireless access throughout. I am tossing around a couple ideas but want to fire this off to the Experts here for some additional suggestions/ideas.

If I use several independent routers will we be forced to use seperate SSID's for each or can they all broadcast the same SSID? Of course, ideally, a person could go to any room in the house and remain connected, or connect using the same connection information.

I have used Linksys expander's before to increase the range of a single WAP but have had marginal results at best with them. Am open to brand suggestions with respect to router/expander combinations that would work. The other question here is will expander's connect to each other or must they be able to 'talk' to the actual access point?

To summarize - I need to setup wireless access in a very large home and ideally would like to have a single SSID/Pass for the entire space. Ideas are welcome and appreciated.

Answer : Wireless access in very large house

Mr Rhodes, you last suggestion is correct, you can essentially just leave the firewall pair in place and simply have the "master" connected to the WAN.  If the master fails, you would lose internet, but your local LAN would still function.

I still do not believe the Y cable with work.  The problem I see is I am unsure if the router will be able to establish Layer 2 connection (namely valid ARP assignments).  when you run through a switch even a dumb switch, every port has a single MAC address connected to it.  The router then knows, hey to reach MAC address "2" and "3", I need to send it to MAC address "1".  On the device with MAC address "1" its ARP table has "2" and "3" on separate ports that are directly directed allowing proper packet routing.

Your Y Cable is attempting to connect multiple MAC addresses to a single port and I am unsure how the router wand firewalls will deal with that.