Usually a DHCP router will say it can give out addresses in the range of 196.168.0.1 to .255. But in a real situation, how many can it realistically handle? If you really had 255 wifi clients would the router be able to keep up? This is assuming the typical router you might find at Best Buy.
I understand that there are bandwith limits of the wireless protocol and there will be a ceiling on how much data can be sent to the clients. But assuming that limit is not hit, would the router be able to handle 255 clients requesting data?
These clients do not need to access the internet. They would just be accessing a webserver on the computer that the router is hooked up to:
I am not positive but I thought my Linksys router said it had capacity for 50. They had to be in the range of (about) 250 specified above, but I think it could only handle 50 at a time within that range.
For some routers you can get “aftermarket” firmware (often freeware) that can extend capacity, and add additional features. I’m running Tomato in a Linksys WRT54G, and it is a significant improvement over the linksys offering.
Depends on the application. Streaming radio or video or voip or RDP or VNC or anything latency dependent will top out at less than 10 users before you have problems. Probably closer to 5 or 6 before interference means delays and dropped packets. At that point a lot of these services are useless.
Web browsing and other connectionless non-latency dependent items? Perhaps closer to 15-20 simultaneous, a lot more if its not simultaneous. The radios in the linksys are weak and cheap. You can do better with higher end equipment but 802.11 only has so many channels and the hardware can only handle so much.
If we remove wireless from the equation and get a 200 port switch and plug it into your linksys, you still have some limits with the router itself. They generally have very little ram and probably have a hard limit on how many outgoing connections it can do. If all 200 computers attempted to “ping google.com” at exactly the same time. I would think most would fail and the rest would have terrible latency.
For 255 clients simultaneous I would use at least 3-6 APs , each on a different channel, but with the same SSID and encryption settings. I probably wouldnt use linksys and wouldnt expect anything latency sensitive to work.
Of course it doesnt hurt to have a large DHCP pool. It doesnt mean youre going to use all 254 IPs, but its better to just give them out with a reasonable lease time than dealing with shortages.
We found the limit to be about 30 systems for normal web surfing. We upgraded to higher end APs that have two external antennas, and have not had a problem. We have 5 of these APs and have hit over 450 users. At that point our content filter overloads and crashes. Our new upgraded content filter is on the way, and we will be installing it before we finish expanding out to 50 APs on about 30 buildings. Our final setup will be supporting about 2000 wireless clients, and maybe 10 wired clients not counting the infrastructure items.
Yeah, it’s completely dependant on what the wifi devices are doing with the connection. email use would pretty much allow for 253 other devices with no problems. Start downloading music and It’s going to back up quickly.
My experience has been that the Router component of the wireless router starts to get flaky after 30 or so clients.
A typical home wireless router contains three components: a NAT Router/Firewall, a Switch, and a Wireless Access Point.
The piece that begins to choke is the NAT Router. The reason, AFAIK, is that every time you open a new web resource, a socket is needed for the returning packets. For each client computer, there could be many open sockets in use. This is why 50 still is too many for one of those little devices.
A couple of options:
As mentioned, just download DD-WRT or some other better firmware
or
Move up to separate devices: firewall/router, switch, and WAP
In the small school where I do tech work, we were frequently hitting the limit with our little Linksys router.
I bought a Soekris Net 4801 device and installed m0n0wallon it. Not only do we have now have nifty new features like a captive portal, but the Soekris box is bombproof and has been handling all the traffic we can throw at it.
For switching, a friend has donated a few cheap commercial switches, the rackmount type.
I have hung a few home wireless routers off our network, in WAP mode (with DHCP disabled and not using the WAN port). Now folks can get in the network from many different places and we have no issues with connections. (and I set them up like HorseloverFat described, with same SSID, different channels)