Mini WiFi router for many client(30)

[psychoo118]

Hi Everyone,

I am looking for a wifi router which is as small as possible and can share the internet coming from ethernet cable through wifi for ~30 clients. The situation is that in our schools we have ethernet connection possibilities but not wifi and my class would like to have a class hotspot. Powersource can be even usb or 220 V wall plug. If anyone has any suggestions i would be very grateful if they share their experiences.

We found a possibility but we have doubts about its performance:
asus wl-330nul

Thanks in advance!
Peter Jozsa

 

[fistv]

Better talk to your IT dept first, you put a rogue hot spot on our network and your butt is out the door. Schools are even stricter and more controlled.

 

[psychoo118]

Better talk to your IT dept first, you put a rogue hot spot on our network and your butt is out the door. Schools are even stricter and more controlled.

Well, it is not a problem.

 

[azazel1024]

Hi Everyone,

I am looking for a wifi router which is as small as possible and can share the internet coming from ethernet cable through wifi for ~30 clients. The situation is that in our schools we have ethernet connection possibilities but not wifi and my class would like to have a class hotspot. Powersource can be even usb or 220 V wall plug. If anyone has any suggestions i would be very grateful if they share their experiences.

We found a possibility but we have doubts about its performance:
asus wl-330nul

Thanks in advance!
Peter Jozsa

I highly doubt that'll handle 30 clients.

What is it exactly you need them to do and what kind of clients would be connected through it? 30 simultaneous connections is pretty darned hard on just about anything. 30 connections that are MOSTLY idle, most of the time, where you might only have 2-4 moderately active clients, most mid/high end consumer routers and access points SHOULD be able to handle okay.

A travel or low end router is almost certainly not going to be able to handle it at all.

30 resonably active clients (like the majority are hitting webpages, or much worse, streaming video) at one time, you will be looking at a commercial/enterprise/SMB solution, not a consumer solution. You'll also need very good clients, possibly 11ac clients if you are going to want to stream video.

Even on higher end 11n, 5GHz, if each client is 2:2 (lets assume decent laptops), that is 300Mbps data rate, with maybe 150Mbps or so usable bandwidth. Divide it by 30 is 5Mbps, which is decent video. That is assuming the air time is being used perfectly and no contention is occuring. Which means you need a nice enterprise access point that has very good airtime fairness. Otherwise with even a very good consumer router, you are likely to only get 50-100Mbps with contention thrown in and some of those clients are likely to see 8-12Mbps and some .5-2Mbps.

 

[azazel1024]

To expand, if you absolutely need this for a classroom and need to go "lower end", my suggestion is look at 3 access points, all dual band. Disable 2.4GHz on them, use 5GHz only, set them all on seperate channels with seperate SSIDs and set 10 clients on each access point.

Or, back to enterprise solution if you want all of them connecting and using wifi at once on a single access point.

 

[psychoo118]

I highly doubt that'll handle 30 clients.

What is it exactly you need them to do and what kind of clients would be connected through it? 30 simultaneous connections is pretty darned hard on just about anything. 30 connections that are MOSTLY idle, most of the time, where you might only have 2-4 moderately active clients, most mid/high end consumer routers and access points SHOULD be able to handle okay.

A travel or low end router is almost certainly not going to be able to handle it at all.

30 resonably active clients (like the majority are hitting webpages, or much worse, streaming video) at one time, you will be looking at a commercial/enterprise/SMB solution, not a consumer solution. You'll also need very good clients, possibly 11ac clients if you are going to want to stream video.

Even on higher end 11n, 5GHz, if each client is 2:2 (lets assume decent laptops), that is 300Mbps data rate, with maybe 150Mbps or so usable bandwidth. Divide it by 30 is 5Mbps, which is decent video. That is assuming the air time is being used perfectly and no contention is occuring. Which means you need a nice enterprise access point that has very good airtime fairness. Otherwise with even a very good consumer router, you are likely to only get 50-100Mbps with contention thrown in and some of those clients are likely to see 8-12Mbps and some .5-2Mbps.

well, thank you for your reply, it helps me a lot Well the maximum clients would be 30 and normally there would be ~ 15-20 clients. It is going to be used for mainly browsing, email, maybe some music stream listening through spotify but "youtubing" could happen sometimes but only by 2 clients.. All of the clients will be mobile phones(mainly mid-category android phones).

 

[stevech]

One $50 N300 or N600 router will do unless 10+ are streaming video.
Search newegg.com for travel routers (ASUS?) if you want really small.

 

[azazel1024]

From those requirements, yeah, a $50 or so NEWER N300 or N600 (N600 would possibly be better to try to divy up the bands a little) AP/router would probably be able to handle things okay if it is mostly going to be web browsing and email, with a small number of those clients doing any kind of audio or video streaming at any one time.

I am skeptical that a travel router would be able to handle it. They generally have reduced RAM specs compared to most full routers, which would make it difficult for them to handle ~30 concurrent clients, even if they are mostly idle clients.

 

[sfx2000]

We found a possibility but we have doubts about its performance:

asus wl-330nul

Thanks in advance!
Peter Jozsa

The WL-330NUL cannot support that many clients - it's not designed to.

It has limited range, and very limited CPU/RAM/Flash - it's good for setting up a bubble in the hotel for a couple of devices, but not much more than that.