Hi,
I would appreciate some help with cAP ax.
Does anyone have experience of maximum number of connections?
Would 100 connections be to much for it?
The usual rule of the thumb is 30-40 per device when designing wireless networks, so the issue is IMHO not so much “How many devices does this AP support?” but rather “How many devices does this AP support while providing the required quality/speed/whatever?”.
You can probably get away witrh 50, but not much more.
While the 512 is a max limit, if you connect (say) 100 devices to a same AP, if they are 100 iot thingies or 100 kids phones (say) playing some games it is not the same thing.
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Is that rough limit going to apply for Wi-Fi 7? I thought the idea of the newer Wi-Fi standards was to allow more clients through fewer devices? Or am I making that up??
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I don't think that wifi 7 would change anything in the number of concurrent clients, things might be slightly better because of the third, 6 GHz, radio but AFAIK 6 GHz clients are not very common.
Check this Huawei Page:
https://support.huawei.com/enterprise/en/doc/EDOC1100381948/8c4be706/network-planning-and-design
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40 - 50 concurrent users are not really a lot...
The idea is "more throughput to those few who can connect to AP" ... with higher frequencies (6GHz) range of APs will shrink compared to 5GHz APs. And the higher throughput is achieved via two ways: wider bandwidth (e.g. 320MHz) which means lower signal strength per MHz (because EIRP limits don't get increased and EIRP is about total power over whole used channel) and higher throughput modulations (and coding) which only work with very good (if not excellent) SINR ... meaning strong signals (which are getting worse due to previously mentioned way of increasing throughputs).
No, nobody's idea is to make new technology to (significantly) increase number of concurrent stations connected to single AP.
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It's a realistic number of any brand of AP 
But if you care for marketing numbers:
The cap ax can sustain 1024 clients (512 per interface)
But I have a question for you:
100 users per interface or per AP?
(Is it 200 total or is it 100 total?)
If I may we are talking of largely theoretical numbers, if you have 100 clients they can be connecting "randomly", i.e., the "extremes" are:
- all 100 on 2.4 GHz (because they all are older devices)
- 50 on 2.4 GHz and 50 on 5 GHz
- all 100 on 5 GHz (because they all are newer devices)
very likely the actual situation will be anything between #1 and #2 or between #2 and #3.
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Doesn’t enhanced OFDMA allow more devices to connect at once, sharing a wide channel? I appreciate a) that underlying RAM/CPU resources also need to be increased to cope with more connections and b) all the client devices have to support this feature (right?) and therefore it’ll be a long time before enhanced OFDMA makes significant impact.
There are different ways of sharing throughput between different active stations:
- CSMA/CS - carrier sense multiple access with collision sensing was traditional technique where one single station can occupy all resources. Other stations try to jump in when channel seems to be unoccupied with chance of collision (multiple stations try to transmit at the same time) which takes some time to resolve (which effectively reduces overall throughput)
- TDMA - time division multiple access where single station will get full downlink (uplink) resources for certain time. Other stations will have to wait for their turn
- OFDMA - orthogonal frequency division multipke access where multiple stations will each get part of spectrum (portion of the orthogonal frequencies available). So they will get data but at reduced speed (relative to full AP speed).
The main effective difference is in reduced RTT and its jitter for stations on a busy AP. It doesn't change number of stations that AP can handle though (if that would be a thing, then "traditional" APs would have a limit of 1 station and we all know that it's not true).
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WiFi5 to WiFi6 was about capacity per AP.
7 is gonna start adding things like MLO where one device will tie up multiple radios at time…
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Yes ... expressed in "Mbps per AP". Not directly about "users per AP" or "connections per AP" which is what @DanijelPG asked in opening post.
OVER 9000
yes this is a complete sentence, what's unclear?