Need a wireless router recommendation to server 40+ people

[Colin McGregor]

On Sat, Jun 25, 2011 at 9:53 AM, William O'Higgins Witteman
<william.ohiggins-H217xnMUJC0sA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> I am providing tech support for a meeting next month, and we want to
> offer wifi to the attendees - 40+ people.  I've got wired gigabit to the
> room, so the question is, which router can I buy that I can configure as
> an open access point and will not barf under 40 people hitting a website
> at once?  Thanks!

You have a bunch of problems here each with different flavors of ugly.
You should be able to assume all your attendees have laptops (or other
devices) that support 802.11g, and you can tell anyone that has an
802.11b only device, sorry, but tough... Okay, I don't care who builds
it or what it is running, there are NO 802.11g routers out there that
could support 40 people hitting a media rich (read video) websites
without barfing, the 802.11g standard just doesn't offer enough
bandwidth. You could go to 802.11n but there are several issues here,
starting with the near certainty that some significantly large
percentage of your users will not support 802.11n so, 802.11g support
will likely be a must. Further, while 802.11n in the 5 GHz band might
be enough enough to support your people, there is no requirement that
802.11n use the 5 GHz band, meaning some 802.11n devices use just use
2.4 GHz other support 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz. The 802.11n devices that just
support 2.4 GHz will be battling for bandwidth the 802.11g devices
(yuck!).

Bottom line, if money wasn't a concern I would set-up multiple routers
as follows:

- 1+ x 5 GHz 802.11n router(s)
- 3 x 2.4 GHz 802.11g routers on channels one each on channels 1, 6 and 11

The above would get your attendees as much bandwidth as is possible.
Get the people who have 5 GHz 802.11n support to go to 5GHz and then
try to get the 802.11g/802.11 2.4 GHz  only people to spread out among
the 2.4 GHz channels.

Beyond that, one of the Unix Unanimous group regulars (a big *BSD fan)
will happily tell you how he can make the Linux TCP/IP stack fall over
(under semi-extreme conditions).  So, while not perfect, I do trust
the Linux TCP/IP stack far more than any proprietary software stack.
There are several 802.11g routers out there that can be made to run
3rd party Linux distros, best known, but hardly only being the Linksys
WRT54GL...

My $0.02

Colin.

> --
>
> yours,
>
> William
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