On 31/10/2011, at 16:09, Sridhar Dhanapalan wrote: > Does anyone know of any affordable wireless APs that can reliably > handle 30+ connections?
You'll find that Wi-Fi is fundamentally unsuitable to that many wireless clients on a single AP (with chatty XO traffic, anyway), whatever hardware brand you throw at the problem. Instead, you should scale horizontally by adding additional access points on additional channels. I won't bore anyone with details, but basically if you plug two or more APs into the same layer-2 network, give them the same ESSID, but put them on different non-conflicting channels (i.e. use 1, 6, and 11 as your pool), they will behave as "cells", and clients will roam between them as needed. Some APs allow you to set a maximum number of clients. You could set, say, 15-20 clients per AP, and that would more evenly distribute the load. Being on the same L2 network would mean the "cells" are perfectly bridged, and thus transparent to the users. Yes, adding APs escalates hardware costs, but you're fighting the laws of physics here.
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