Hi all - I am interested to hear from WISP’s that are using the MikroTik OS in wireless mode -
Whats the max number of wireless clients that you have managed to associate with a single radio and still give them all a good service.
I’ve heard of folks with 100+ associated clients but would like to know if this is really achievable?
Cheers
Rob
Airzone
remember that if you have a 10Mbit link connected to the access point and the access point itself is 11mbit (in reality about 6) then just imagine what a pain it is to be one of those 100 who divide this between themselves …
theoretical maximum is 2007. others please share your experience regarding this.
We work on a 40:1 contention so 100 customers using a 6Mb link at 512k each is more than enough!!
I’d be interested to hear of real world scenarios where you have an 802.11b radio and lots of customers.
To date I have used SmartBridge AP’s and these start to run out of steam with more than 35 customers - I’d like to have a MikroTik AP with a high end motherboard, processor and memory hopefully increasing the above 35-40 limit of the SmartBridge AP’s.
Cheers
Rob
i guess the fact that here in latvia people have 10 or 100 mbit links in their homes has somewhat crippled my understanding of internet access 
how much!!!
what does 10Mb or even 100Mb cost in Latvia for a home user?
for my 10mbits i pay about 30$ a month (no limits, no traffic accounting). there is my colleague here who pays the same for a 100mbit
how are the ISP’s delivering 100Mb to a home? I can only assume that is over Fibre and not Wireless?
they have their fiber optics which they then divide with 100mbit hubs/switches. this usually works in rural areas where there are a lot of homes (apartment buildings). here is the latvian internet exchange sheme: http://www.lix.lv/shema/shema.htm but this is kind of off-topic
Bandwidth isn’t the bottleneck really, it’s the half duplex nature of 802.11b (nstream cures this).
You have to treat an AP as a conventional class 1/11 repeater, you wouldn’t throw too many people on a single segment, most cases you’d limit each segment to 12 seats. This is not exactly correct as a repeater is using CSMA/CD, and an AP is using CSMA/CA, so it would be like a hybrid ethernet/tokenring network as the AP can poll clients if they reach set thresholds.
Another thing that tends to nail wireless is small packets, if you have a client throwing >100packets/sec at the AP and maybe consuming less than 10kB/sec, they’re still going to cause the AP to struggle with the load. So having lots of clients giving out the occational burst of small packets can tie things up a bit. Unless you’re using ‘packet packing’ between MTRouters etc.
Anyway, to answer the question the most amount of clients I have on a single AP (single channel) is ~25.
So it’s probably better if you have multiple wireless interfaces with sectorised antennas when operating in high density areas.
And for those in Latvia, send some bandwidth down this way!
I have Mikrotik AP with 45 users with no probs, cheers…