Looking for a recommendation for a wireless router that can support up to 20

[MrMaster]

Looking for a recommendation. Have a school getting 20 laptops. What's a router or network setup that would be recommended to support up to 20 wireless connections. I believe the new cisco linksys routers support up to 10 max?

I was thinking 2 buffalo routers would do the trick. It is for a small school.

 

[JackMDS]

The issue might be more related to location.

One Wireless Access Point might cover 20 people if they are in one room or within very close proximity to it.

Otherwise Bandwidth allocation for the expected tasks and Signal environment are the main variables.

You did not provided any information that might help to help you.

 

[Mr.Wolfclaw]

20 people going through one wireless access point (the router) will result in poor network performance.

Better to share the load between dedicated access points and wire these abck to the main router, which should be of commercial grade rather than consumer.

 

[MrMaster]

I would not expect 20 wireless clients connecting at the same time. That's why I was thinking 2 access points. The router, I believe is industry grade. Can't remember what it is but I'm not worry about that. I have access to good stuff.

It's a small school. I think they only have 5 class rooms. largest class is 16 and there are wired connections for that room. (former computer lab)

 

[gsaldivar]

Routing shouldn't be a problem, the limit will be amount of traffic saturating a single channel. While 20 users on a single channel might be within the technical limit of some equipment, I would expect noticeable and significant degradation of performance when all 20 are using the network at the same time. I would suggest two separate access points running the same SSID on different channels. You can use two different routers if you want, but it's not necessary. The bottleneck will be in the amount of traffic per channel, not the routing. You will want to do a wireless site survey to select channels that are unused, and not adjacent to one another.

Good luck.

 

[ScottMac]

Commercial-grade APs are rated for 20 or less, given "normal" traffic. If you were only receiving a few text emails each, you could support fifty users. If you are doing deep database searches, you might support as many as five simultaneous users. General usage / surfing, twenty is pushing it, depending on the site, how much flash, how many pictures, etc.

It's shared bandwidth, like a hub with really crappy cabling, and a lot of interference.
Someone will invariably cheat and suck up more than their share. Plan on at least 19 ticked off users.