Wireless Access

Hello,

I'm wondering if anyone has experience with user capacity for AP-655's and what their typical user count is before seeing service degradation? I've heard the absolute hardlimit is 512 users per radio, but a practical limit is closer to 150 per radio. We get hit with extremely poor performance when there's a high number of users, but have no issues when there are a small number of users.

The environment is a conductor managed cluster of two controllers in tunneled mode. The space is roughly 120 clients and is a relatively small area. Originally, there was only one AP, but due to the impact on performance, another AP was added so 60 users per AP. The channel plan was set so neither AP is on the same channel. Even with the two AP's it got to a point that it's almost unusable, so we added another access point to reduce the user count effectively to 40 clients per AP. All are set so that none are on the same channel. We're still experiencing issues with performance to the point it can become unusable even with general web browsing with three AP's. The AP's are spaced evenly throughout the room and clients per AP are relatively balanced.

We've tried using 40MHz,and 80MHz widths and although there's some improvement with the wider channels, performance is still quite poor.

Are there any suggestions for a small room with high density deployment that has worked for anyone?

The first question for that design is going to be "what is the minimum expected throughput (in some cases this may require looking at airtime rather than bandwidth) requirement for each client?"  Once you've answered that you can do the math to figure out how many clients you can support per radio based on the channel width that you make available.

If your 120 clients are all sitting in a room running some voice and video application, then you'll see a much lower number of clients per AP than if you're just needing to allow them email and web access.