How many laptops to a wireless AP?

[Bill McGonigle]

On 02/27/2009 08:02 PM, Ted Roche wrote:
> Can 25 people share a single wireless access point, or will more than
> one be needed? Would a consumer-grade WRT54G or equivalent be suitable?

Just a few additional notes:

I'm not sure how great the dicotomy is between 'consumer' gear and 
'professional' gear if you're willing to 'void the warranty'. 
Pricepoint alone isn't a sufficient indicator - some of the brands with 
different levels of 'hardware' just have different software on them. 
So, a Linksys box with DD-WRT or OpenWRT does a bunch more than stock 
firmware and may compete favorably with Cisco offerings.

Some of the latest gear is very integrated.  Buffalo is back on the 
market (++ they support open firmwares) with practically the whole 
device integrated into a Ralink chip (MIPS core, radio, networking, 
serial, etc. all on one die).  The parts are getting good and cheap and 
it's becoming hard for the vendor to substitute lower-quality 
components.  Beyond that, for a cafe setting, it's the OS that's going 
to make or break the deal.  For long-range work or meshing, certain 
radio chipsets certainly do better than others, but that's a different 
requirement stack.

I've usually done school settings figuring on 10 high-volume users per 
802.11g access point.  That's worked well and I haven't had a need to 
try to cram more on since $50 radios are easy to throw at the problem 
(within the bounds of the 3-color map).  In settings like a gym we 
expect more users but lower usage, and one access point to cover the 
crowd of parents catching up on e-mail during the game seems to do fine.

DD-WRT has very easy traffic classification, but the GUI maxes out at 
4096 connections in the state table.  A major variable in your plan is 
going to be what you're going to do with the likes of Bittorrent 
traffic.  You might consider having an extra device as a head node to 
the Internet connection and doing your traffic shaping there.  It can be 
another $50 box.

-Bill

-- 
Bill McGonigle, Owner           Work: 603.448.4440
BFC Computing, LLC              Home: 603.448.1668
bill at bfccomputing.com           Cell: 603.252.2606
http://www.bfccomputing.com/    Page: 603.442.1833
Blog: http://blog.bfccomputing.com/
VCard: http://bfccomputing.com/vcard/bill.vcf