I was wondering if there is a general rule for how many access points to use per number of users that will be on a network. I am looking at an area that can easily be covered by 1 to 2 access points. My concern is that 2 access points won't handle the necessary bandwidth for up to
150 users. I know even on the router side with that many users I likely will get a lot of latency, especially during peak traffic times. I was looking at the 1130 a/b/g access points. Some feedback would be greatly appreciated.
Depends on the size of the area you intend to cover, the cut-through and potential interference of the walls, objects, and even persons in the designated service area. With b/g you can co-locate up to three APs using non-overlapping channels for throughput aggregation. You can get even more non-overlapping channels if your clients can be constrained to 802.11a. You will want to spend some time designing your network so that even if you have an ideal number of users per access point, and that you have a good strategy for managing your traffic flow. From what I understand, APs are essentially shared medium like a hub, and congestion can be a severe problem, especially if your clients are not carefully managed and your limited number of APs have to fall back to b-only operation, etc. I've always used 1 AP per 40 users as a rule of thumb, but my site surveys rarely if ever correlated to that measure. On the other hand my networks have been generally over-built but I would rather spend little extra and never have to listen to anyone report connectivity problems that could not be solved at the client engineering level.
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