WRT54GS used as neighborhood HotSpot

The theoretical limit is 253 connections as limited by the DHCP server and the number IP's that can be NAT translated and routed by the IP stack. I've actually connected with about 150 simulated network connections, with a different router, with few ill effects. However, there was little traffic involved.

The practical limit really depends on the type of users and the backhaul. The cynical rule of thumb is: 100 typical light home users 10 typical business users 1 downloader

This is largely true as one user can easily saturate your entire bandwidth depending on what they are doing. Someone firing off a bittorrent session can saturate all your bandwidth indefinately. To solve this problem, many access points and hot spots offer bandwidth management or QoS features. These will limit the amount of bandwidth an individual connection can monopolize. At that point, the number of users is limited by the bandwidth managers rule set. You may also want to tinker with the speed, as a high speed connection will hog more bandwidth than a slow connection.

You might wanna slog through: |

Also, be sure to look into dedicated firmware for running a hot spot.

Jeff, I didn't see any overt mention of hot spot firmware on the

Ed

The major requirements for a hot spot are bandwidth management, a splash screen, and some means of authorizing users.

See:

Most of the hot spot specific software is based on NoCatAuth:

I thought HyperWRT had a hot spot specific port, but I guess I was mistaken. I think I was thinking of EWRT, which is made for hotspots

Thanks, Jeff. Since I am running HyperWRT on my Linksys, I thought I'd see what they had for hotspot software....

Appreciate the clarification.

Ed