High-Use Wireless Zone Router

[ilyons]

I'm currently working at a study abroad program in Italy and looking to beef up our wireless a good bit. The problem is that, since Italy is very nearly a third-world country in terms of infrastructure, all of our ~120 students frequently come to the school building for the express purpose of using the internet, which means that at times we have upwards of 50 students sitting in a ~1200ft2 area trying to all stream video, download, etc.

Another problem is that we have a huge mix of computers -- four generations of Macs and PCs running everything from XP Home to 7 Pro.

I'm hoping that someone might be able to suggest a setup -- be it one excellent router, multiple routers, anything -- that would help to improve quality of service. Internet is life and death to these students, as I've found out in the past couple of months.

Thanks very much!

 

[thiggins]

How fast is your Internet service? In the end, that's going to be the limiting factor.

Downloads and streams will easily suck up bandwidth unless you have some sort of bandwidth controls in place. See these articles for ideas:
Taming Your Network's Bandwidth Hogs - Part 1
Taming Your Network's Bandwidth Hogs - Part 2

 

[ilyons]

Well, I'd ideally like for them to do whatever they want and provide a "home away from home" in terms of Internet access, since it's important that they be able to Skype and communicate with their families. For that, I'm definitely going to be stepping up the bandwidth. Right now, we're running on 2 4mb/s SDSL lines -- neither of which gets the full 4mb/s -- and I'm talking to the company about stepping it up.

Part of my concern in terms of the mixed network is that some of the machines -- especially those running Vista, but occasionally Macs as well -- have trouble with the DHCP setup. To be specific, the WAP is a Cisco WAP4410N and runs, through a switched environment, to a LinkSys/Cisco RV082 gateway.

I thought it might be some kind of congestion causing the DHCP drops/failure to recognize the returned packet from the gateway (which functions as DHCP server), but if you say that no amount of traffic can make the internet slow/router get bogged down as long as there's enough bandwidth, I believe you.

 

[ilyons]

Also, those articles are great... thanks!

 

[thiggins]

You may be running out of DHCP leases, a common problem with a busy WLAN with many users. You'll need to set the DHCP lease time to be pretty short, hours, not days and perhaps minutes.

And, of course, no Torrenting!

 

[ilyons]

Hi thiggins,

Thanks for the advice. The DHCP range is currently 100 addresses, and from looking at the DHCP server's status, I'm fairly sure that there are no issues with IP address crowding. I am, on the other hand, very much going to use pfSense to drop the priority for Bittorrent clients down to about 0.