I have built a MT AP with a RB532 and a Senao 11mbps 200mw.
How many clients can I connect to this senao? or there is no limit?
Theoretical limit is 2007, of course you cannot associate too many clients in real networks.(~50-70 ).
well maybe even 100 if speed is not an issue (clients will divide the available bandwidth …)
try not more than 40. if you use omni ant, not more than 20.
i use a 12db omni ant… why no more 20???
why normis says 100 and you 20…
of course i like more normis’ answer, but i want to know more about your experience..
thanks
Hello,
The issue is not the Mikrotik AP but the interface you are using. I can tell you first hand experience if you go more than 30-35 clients on wireless interface, you will be pushing it far. if you are talking of clients on the AP and on several wireless interfaces, at present Im having well over 50 clients on 1 AP but using 2 Wireless interfaces.
We have about 16 aps, one wireless interface on each. The top critical ap have about 80 clients. They not share equally bandwidth maybe cuz there are different manufaturers in 802.11b and who have atheros on the client side get priority over the others. Our problem at the moment is that every ap, no matter the number of clients connected, get its packet flow rate droping down from times to times. So far Im thinking that what we doing here is an absurd. 
Its being hard to think on a solution or find the bottle neck… There are no problem for people who open web pages, but who are connected using pppoe cant watch stream and who are playing games gets kicked from servers cuz of high ping peaks. There must have a way to give them a stable connection. Their CIR seems not working as well. Lets say, I would like to see a ap with 80 clients equally sharing bandwidth (CIR working) where one of them is playing games without ping times peaks. In theory this may be possible, but we didnt found yet a setup (in theory) to reach this objective. All we can do atm is read, learn and test over production occasionally causing stress to our clients… 
Im thinking on implement QoS and queues at the Ap instead on the main router, but still a question unanswered if (in theory) it will help. Maybe some day I can stop being a voice screaming on the desert…
As an experiment.
Let’s say only 20 are online at the same time. Let’s pretend there are no retransmissions and everything is working perfect with no packets per second issues.
You have 6 mbit divided by 20 which is 300 kbit’s each, to maintain around 300 kbit’s you need somewhere around 40 kbit’s upstream. so that leaves you 260 kbit’s for a singel download. Are your customers subscriptions by any chance limited to somewhere around that area?
Most of all customers mine have 128k limit, 10% CIR… so, Should I assume there are room for about 40 clients with a CIR higher than 50%? Then 80 clients at 12.8k at the same time is a real possibility without any packet flow issue, I think… Is that not true?
If I have 100 clients simultaneously connected (and using net) to an AP.. they have 11mbps/100 of bandwidth eachone, or there is some other limitation, for example they present desconectations ¿??
what do you mean by:
i don’t understand the question
sorry for my poor english
What download and upload rates (speeds) do you intend to offer your customers (subscribers) and are you intending to provide a high quality service.
The point was that it’s almost meaningless, unless you choose polling, to ask how many stations (subscribers) can be connected unless you also state at which transfer rates (speeds) and the desired outcome that you are considering.
Example; If i want my customers to each have 1000 kbit download rate and 500kbit upload rate then out of 6000 possible mbit in aggregated throughput i’ll be able to put ( 6000 kbit / ( 1000 kbit + 500 kbit ) ) = 4 without over subscribing the service. If you over subscribe you decrease the probability of maintaining the same level of service.
It really shouldn’t come as a surprise that equipment from different manufacturers perform worse together than equipment from the same manufacturer.
The main bottleneck in your case is the radio in the ap but your problem sounds more like a network design issue.
Do you by any chance use bridging?
CIR and bandwidth are two different things.
Keep in mind with 802.11b the interface is half-duplex. The radio cannot transmit and receive at the same time. So the best case would be under 6 meg then subtract overheads, encryption, retries. Heavy uploads can swamp the apparent download speeds. Then depending on the interface, someone connects at 1 meg - either all fall to 1 meg or the card has to switch to service the low client.
Rather than using omni antenna, i would prefer to devide it to 3 sectors using 120 sectoral antenna. Omni couldn’t serve too many people, besides the interference issues, the power of the antenna is also an issues. So i suggest to use no more than 20 users if you’re on omni antenna.
We have atm the following structure:
Internet20mbit->CISCO->MT.Router(+DNS,PPPOE AC, HTTP, Radius)->(hub/switch)->MainNode(eth1,wlan1,wlan2) then wlan1 and wlan2 lead to another node on different sides of the backbone which go on to about 6 consecutive nodes on each side and finally every node have one ap 802.11b. Everything from MT.Router to any AP is bridged, no conntrack. Every node link is wds 802.11a. We do not use 802.11g yet. Im thinking on stop using bridge and close the AP with routing instead. This sounds better, but I didnt figure yet how to better distribute public IPs routing each AP instead bridging all nets to a main router, including PPPoE service…
Also keep in mind, that AP have to operate at different air rates. So it uses 11Mbps air rate roughly half of the time it transmits the data.
in my town there is no cable modem, adls or something like that… there is only dial up, and i’m a small wisp who wants to give people a better alternative to dial up…
it’s no difficult to beat dial up jajjaa… but my bottleneck is not the 11mbps of the ap… my bottleneck is the dedicated 1mbps internet connection.
I have heard people who have more than 100 clients in the Access list of a MT Access Point. It’s true that never the 100 clients are connected at the same time… and never all connected clients are accessing the net at the same time…
In fact… forget about speed…
How many clients can I connect to a MT AP simultaneously?
up there where pretty decent answers - but thoreticaly about 2007 if i recon correcly 
50 is OK if speed is none of you concerns
and what hardware are you going to use? if RB500 then that abowe
in this case … as many as you have …