how many clients can connect

[roguecoolman]

quick question.

If I get a wifi AP (either smc or linksys, nothing high tech), how many clients can connect to it ?

can they all connect at the same time? access internet at the same time?

[M/Q]

Tough question, you pretty much have to answer it yourself. Determine what you think the individual client will need for bandwidth and then you take half of the advertised bandwidth and see how many users you can get. Then I would subtract about 25-30%of those to have a fudge factor. IMHO, I really try to keep less than 10 per 11b WAP. That is is approx 550k per user if they are all working the WAP really hard at the same time.

[JJDinsay]

There are some nifty tools out there that can generate simulated traffic and allow you to measure the perfromance of your AP but dey are crazy expensive so that's probably not an option. Remember advertised speeds for AP - 22, 54, 88, 108 (the use propietary compression technologies) are for ideal conditions which mean they don't exist. You probably get half that but seeing as a DSL line is only 512/256 and T1 is something like 1.2 Mbps then those speeds should be fine if used for surfing. I find that using wireless for regular LAN stuff like copying files like MP3's tends to slow it down a little. Anyway to get back to my point, the best bet is to start of with a number of 10 users per AP and then start from there. I run 10 on my 3Com 11g AP which is advertised to support up to 250 users and it's still OK. 5 more people in my building have signed up and I'm setting it up this weekend since there is no performance hit. Pretty much, just add users and take not of the drop in performance - believe me they will let U know about it.