Don't think in terms of "clients per AP". Think in terms of clients per radio, as some access points have more than one radio. At this point, it depends on what you're doing. 25 per radio is a good rule of thumb, but for some things we go as high as 30. For other things, like asking a full classroom to all watch a video at the same time, 25 per radio is no good at all. 50 is just too many.
You also need to think in terms of clients per rf channel. If you have enough density, adding radios won't help. You'll need a way to partition the rf space, so that sets of clients are divided into different rf cells. Using 5ghz can help with this, but only to the extent that your clients support it. Sent from my iPad On Feb 24, 2013, at 6:55 PM, Jeff Kell <jeff-k...@utc.edu> wrote: > On 2/24/2013 7:45 PM, Bob Williamson wrote: >> What is considered to be "too many clients per AP"? >> >> We have 30 APs and 450 K-12 students (100 of which are dorm students). We >> also have a number of "carts" containing 15+ laptops the move around the >> school, "carts" with 15+ Ipads moving around the school and computers labs >> (stationary!) with 15 + computers. >> >> 350+ devices at any given time. I have seen as many as 50+ on a single AP >> quite often. > > 50 on an AP is workable, if they're not all doing Netflix/Youtube. 50 > on a *radio* is another story. Beyond that it depends on the split of > 2.4 and 5 Ghz connections, data rates (slower ones eat up more airtime), > and multi-band N-clients. > > Bottom line is that client counts per AP, or even per radio, aren't > absolutes relative to the user experience. But yes, I would prefer > "not" to see 50 or more clients on a single AP. It's unavoidable in an > auditorium / lecture hall / arena type setting, but those are typically > "best effort" to begin with at this point. > > Jeff > > ********** > Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent > Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/. ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
