How many Wi-Fi clients is too many?

[Morac]

I have a GT-AX6000 with 17 client devices on 5 GHz and 18 on 2.4 GHz with a few other ones that connect as needed.

I’m wondering how many GT-AX6000 Wi-Fi clients it can handle?

My older RT-AC3100 could handle them, but had issues locking up if there were too many clients connected for too long.

 

[Tech9]

Most home routers support about 30 clients per radio.

 

[Morac]

What happens if that is exceeded?

 

[Tech9]

Nothing much happens. It works well enough for you or it doesn’t. It depends on what clients are connected and what they do. If it doesn’t work well anymore - you get better equipment that supports more clients or add another router/AP and spread the clients around. Business APs usually support 200 clients. Some up to 600. If you need one of those for home use - irreversible IoT obsession perhaps happened already.

 

[Morac]

Would the router completely crash or just Wi-Fi performance would suffer. i could deal with the later, but not the former.

 

[sfx2000]

Most home routers support about 30 clients per radio.

IIRC - Asus caps at 32 devices per radio...

Which is a practical and reasonable limit - the more devices, the less airtime is available per device.

Might see some enterprise class AP's suggest that they support up to 200 (or more) devices, but note here that again airtime is a shared medium, and so is backhaul to the access point.

 

[sfx2000]

Would the router completely crash or just Wi-Fi performance would suffer. i could deal with the later, but not the former.

They would not be allowed to attach until the number of devices is below the limit.

 

[Tech9]

Correct, but enterprise class AP with 400 clients support and -100dBm radio sensitivity costs few times more than GT-AX6000 home router. Different hardware built for different purposes. It's still interesting to see how business class AP with internal antennas holds the connections to -92dBm and a home router with gigantic plastic sticking outside drops them at -86dBm at higher Tx power levels. Plastic marketing in action.

 

[RMerlin]

IIRC - Asus caps at 32 devices per radio...

It varies by model/platform.

admin@stargate:/tmp/home/root# nvram get wl0_bss_maxassoc
75

admin@RT-AX86U_Pro-E930:/tmp/home/root# nvram get wl0_bss_maxassoc
128

 

[Morac]

It looks like the GT-AX6000 is also 75. If that’s per radio that would work fine.

Presumably if I needed more, I could use AiMesh with a wired back haul.

Thanks.

 

[Tech9]

Again, it depends on what the clients do. You may need an extra AP with under 10 clients if they consume the entire channel bandwidth. You have more limitations than just a number in firmware. Some people buy 3-radio routers just because of single high-bandwidth demanding VR headset.

 

[Morac]

Nearly all of my devices are IOT devices so they don’t use much bandwidth.

 

[wonderiuy]

How many can you count?

 

[Dr Mono]

Interesting conversation. I wish they included this info in the specs. I have a TUF AX5400 and no idea what's max number per radio...