Wireless Access

Good Day,

I am new to the forums, so forgive me if this has been commented on before.  I have a few questions:

1) On AP105/AP125 is there a limit as to the number of WPA2 Enterprise clients an AP can handle (accounting for the natural degradation of the performance for load)  We have 3 SSIDs broadcast.  1 guest open ssid, 1 WEP, and 1 WPA2 enterprise.  We also connect the ap's to either 100Base-T or 1000Base-T and notice little difference on the number of clients the AP can handle.

2) What would be a reasonable Signal Quality/SNR for performance (I have heard 35 is a good number)?

3) Is there a RIP routing option for the OAW-6000 controller?

Thanks A Bunch

I am a strong believer in the fact that everything depends on your environment.  If you have lots of users that are constantly roaming around you want to make your deployment as dense as possible.  I would try not to have more than 25-30 clients at max, and realistically for best performance I try to keep a high water mark of 15-20 clients / AP.

Do not add any more than 3 SSIDs otherwise you will degrade performance.

In school environments you will find that users tend to migrate to places that you had no idea they would be using their devices :) so be prepared to do some tuning when you get things fired up.

Also if you are thinking about BYOD this adds to the mix, so instead of one device per user, you could be looking at two or three, it is important to not base your coverage on your users, but expected devices.

Obviously this is not technical, but my personal expeirence with the AP105.

What about if the AP is connected @ 100M not 1000M?  Would a AP-135 fair better?  Thanks again

Everything is still very dependent on what you are doing in your environment, and how big you environment is...  I have seen nightmare designs where people had over 2000 devices on a single subnet, where almost 30% of their utilization was just multi-cast traffic.  Mix this with poor coverage and it was just a slow mess...  You have to look at your environment and estimate a bit on where you users are going to be, where is device usage going to converge.  

What type of environment is this, what common applications are ran over the network.  Do you do voip over wifi?  Are you tunneling or bridging your connections?

The APs are gre tunneled, we have around APs, the APs are segregated from the traffic on the lan, The clients (more than 2,000 at peak)  on the WPA2 ssid are on the same subnet  We drop IPv6, broadcast and multicast traffic.  We don't use VoWifi, although it would be nice to be on the path to be able to do it in the future.

As well we bandwidth limit the clients when they are accessing content from off network, which is a lot of the traffic.

Another thing that you can do is the remove the WEP SSID or change it to some version of WPA2-AES-PSK maybe, because it limits the association rate of clients to 54mb (you cannot get 802.11n rates on a WEP SSID).  That will drag down the performance of other clients that could be associating at higher rates.