Wireless Access Points

[FrecklesTheDestroyer]

I'd love to test this stuff out, but, alas, I have school, books, car payments, insurance, and rent to pay for first. Needless to say..... I'M BROKE. Anyways, on access points (802.11g), is the number of users allowed limited (to 255 i would assume), or will the speeds decrease as more traffic goes through the ap? If it is limited, and I needed to support, let's say, 350 users at a time, I would obviously need 2 or more aps. Would those 2 aps share the load equally, if not equally, will the excess load transfer over to ap #2? I am assuming they both would need some feature built in to share the load equally, is bridging what I am looking for? Lastly, is the 802.11g standard more secure than 802.11b?

 

[Cheetah8799]

It's not all about traffic in total. The number of users can cause problems because of the sheer amount of users. You could have 10 people doing simple web surfing and have bandwidth issues because of the wireless, even though the max bandwidth has not been reached.

If you're talking about doing 350 users, I think you'll need a lot more than 2 APs. Maybe if you had really good ones, NOT Linksys/Netgear/DLink, I'm talking the corporate/industry quality stuff. Then maybe you could do it with a smaller number of APs.

Security between b and g is the same. It's just a bandwidth issue with the naming. Unless if someone wants to get technical and correct me.


You may want to do some reading up on Ad-Hoc wireless networks. That's where each user connects to their neighbors to make a web of traffic, instead of a big star/wheel all going back to the AP. You could also look into the Locustworld MeshAP project. Interesting stuff, but I haven't done anything with it for a while. http://locustworld.com/

 

[InlineFive]

1. Speeds will decrease as more traffic connects because the bandwidth is shared between active users.
2. I don't think that any consumer routers have this functionality. If you had two connected with WDS then they would appear as one network and clients should supposedly connect to the closest AP. Enterprise routers might have this ability but I'm not sure.
3. 802.11g is much more secure then 802.11b but if you are having a 350 person HotSpot it would be much more convenient to have it be open.

 

[Cheetah8799]

802.11g is much more secure then 802.11b

In what way?

 

[spidey07]

A good design rule is 10-20 people per access point.

As far as wireless design it has so much to do with the location your trying to cover. From there you can tune the power and antenna to provide the coverage you need.

"Good" access points have a roaming feature that allows any wireless client (once authenticated) to attach to any access point nearby. There is software and appliances that make this happen.

hope that helps. ktwebb is our resident wireless guru aboud here.

 

[FrecklesTheDestroyer]

Alright, thanks for the posts. I had no clue what WDS was, so I looked it up..

WDS (Wireless Distribution System) is a Wireless Access Point mode that enables wireless bridging in which WDS APs communicate only with each other only (without allowing for wireless clients or stations to access them), and/or wireless repeating in which APs communicate both with each other and with wireless stations (at the expense of half the throughput).

So I guess wireless repeating is what I would look for then. Just wanted to know for future reference.