Advice to buy Access point with high concurrent user capacity

[blademan]

Hi experts,

I have read in this forum for Access Point selection but there is none of mention about concurrent users per Access Point.

I have plan to buy few access points for my coffee shop which is small and open space. Its square is 65m2.

In my case, throughput and signal is not important. I need a access point with high concurrent users. And my available price is about 30-50$.

The normal cheap wifi access point I known is always crash or dump while its clients are about 10 to 15.

Any advice? please help!

 

[stevech]

you do need to worry about a good/usable signal.
Consumer grade WiFi.. about 10-20 concurrently associated users is what you can expect.

Advise: Choose a Linksys E1200 or some such wifi router. Reconfigure it to be an access point. Connect it to your existing router via cat5. This is because your users are casual, not VIP business. If you want 1 or 2 access devices, and you have at most about 50-75 associated users- you'll need a pro grade AP and lots of speed from your ISP. A pro grade might be Cisco Aironet.

Do not connect any business PC in your shop to the same network as the public WiFi. There are ways to safely isolate public from your business PC(s), with a common network.

You'll need some professional advice and a specific solution that shouldn't cost you more than $250. Don't DIY.

 

[sm00thpapa]

For a small space like you mention I would suggest a TL-WR842ND V1 as it has 4 SSID support or the V2 as it only has 2 SSID support. As the member above me stated you can separate your network from public customers and business personnel. That would be safest for your own security. Hope this helps. Good luck.

 

[PrivateJoker]

Also many routers that support DD-WRT or Tomato firmware, Chillspot, etc, can be configured to actually operate with a landing page, etc, in a true "hotspot" type setup.

It's also worth mentioning that best practice wouldn't be to leave the network open & unsecured. Putting the password on a dry erase board or something and forcing people to use WPA2 encrypts the traffic so others in the space cannot easily snoop. Even if customer X knows the p/w and wants to watch customer Y's activity and he has the shared PW, it still adds a serious speed bump into spying on your fellow patron.

 

[Dreamslacker]

Do adjust your DHCP server for short lease times (30min to 1 hour) if this is for customers or you might run out of IPs to issue if the router isn't smart enough.

I've encountered this for a customer I serviced for my previous workplace (a News Corp subsidiary). The access point held up remarkably well but the Juniper SSG20 was setup by their previous vendor with a 24 hour lease time and it wouldn't release the old inactive leases when it ran out of IP addresses.

This wasn't an issue before they expanded but once they did, 40 - 50 laptop users on wireless along with smartphones and tablets wiped out their leases once they come back from lunch break (the devices request new IPs and the router did not renew or release the old IPs).

 

[stevech]

Consumer routers limit the number of associations - as each one consumes memory/buffers. Some, when the planned limit is reached, de-associate the oldest or least active client. No way to know how these work.

Professional grade APs tend to have more memory, smarter techniques, as mentioned above for Cisco Aironet (not Linksys).

DHCP - unlikely, but a factory default might have a too small range.

All of this, and many more, is why you would benefit from an on-site visit from a good pro.