wireless recommendation for small 5000 sqft office, 30 employees

[jmphx]

I am looking into upgrading our small office's wireless network and would like to get some feedback from the community.

Here are some details about the office:
- our office is the 2nd floor in a 3 floor building.
- there are a few other AP's near us (other businesses), but it's not too bad
- approx 5000 sq ft
- mostly square, about 67' x 70'
- about 30 employees
- 75% of employees use laptops and wireless (60%/40% mac/windows)
- plenty of iPads, androids, and iphones too

Current problems:
- random "drop outs" suffered throughout the day, especially when the office is crowded.

The previous solution was a Netgear WNDR3700, which would actually freeze up when the network got too busy. This was replaced by an Apple Time Machine (dual-band, simul.). The time machine is better, it doesn't freeze up and require a reboot, but we still have dropouts throughout the day which is a pain. Especially with our reliance on skype (sales calls, conference calls with external contractors, etc).

My current thinking is to augment the existing network with 1 or 2 more Apple Airport Extreme's with same SSID and WPA2 key. I've started a preliminary site survey and have a general idea on where I would place the new AP's, but before I go down this path I'd like to get some feedback from you guys.

Also, I have a few questions:
- What is a good target for "clients-per-AP ratio"? I've read in some of the Cisco documentation that 10-15 per AP is a good target, but with consumer-grade gear I imagine this may be less. I'm thinking 10 (for the apple airports)

- What is a good target for RSSI in all of the 'critical' locations? Again, from some older cisco documentation, it looks like you generally don't get anymore throughput with signal better than about -60 for 802.11g and -70 for 802.11b, but what about 802.11n (2 and 5ghz)? I'm thinking shooting for -50 to -55 would be safest.

 

[thiggins]

There are no easy answers to either of your questions. There are a lot of "it depends".

Yes, spreading clients among multiple access points may help, but the trick would be to actually get the clients to attach to the different APs. With biz-class managed APs, there are tools to help this. Not so with consumer stuff. Best approach may be to reduce transmit power and place APs so that their coverage doesn't overlap.

Be sure that you're not running out of addresses on your DHCP server. Set the leases short and make sure that your server isn't assigning a new IP to the same client upon reconnect.

 

[stevech]

Start with security.
AAA?
RADIUS?
VLAN?