I have a project to create a free hotspot for approximately 1500 simultaneous users and would like to create it using Mikrotik but, can’t find 2.4Gghz external AP to deploy using CapsMan. I don’t want to use another vendor. The idea is to use about 10-20 ap (meshed) and use radius server with maybe an RB3100. Don’t know if those equipment would really do the job but, at least need to start it.
The MT APs I’ve seen come with License 4 which won’t support more the 25 concurrent users.
What equipment you guys recommend in order to fulfill this task?
How big is the area? Is it a convention hall? Exhibition place? Stadium?
If you have open area’s, I would really consider other vendors like Xirrus, Aruba, Ruckus. Yes, I know you do not want it, and yes we all love Mikrotik, but this setup will not work with Mikrotik. But these brands specialize in big amounts of users.
You can use Mikrotik for routing purpose (and I think the RB3011 is a little too weak). A CCR series router would be better.
The area to be covered is important to know. If the people are to be densely packed (say, a concert or a stadium) then as the fellow forumer above said, you’d better deploy high-density APs such as from the brands mentioned and then use a CCR1016 to do the routing. What you are saying about L4 License supporting up to 20 users is not correct, these are logins to User Manager, which is the Mikrotik’s radius implementation. You don’t necessarily need it, depends on your setup.
If you tell us a bit more about the setup, we may be able to help more.
The area to be covered is a small (14000 squared meters) college campus.
Was thinking, if not MT then Unifi AC Mesh Pro. Deploy 6-10 and use a CCR1009 as core.
Make structured network instead of mesh. Use sector antennas placed according to local situation ( buildings, obstacles) and expected clients. Use sxt2, groove or basebox2 for endpoint accesspoints and wires or wapg60 as backbone to your central router.
You think a sxt2 will support at least 100 concurrent clients?
I tried using a basebox2 once and it just froze with less than 100 users trying to connect at once.
You might have problems with such amount of clients per one radio. Just check how WiFi protocol works by its design and imagine that many clients will be out of ideal signal level borders…
You can achieve that with channel and careful parameter selection to give ‘cells’ of coverage which overlap ~15%. Employ client isolation and enable only 11n/ac, but don’t use wireless for the ‘mesh’.
I disagree with this; I have had 80 users happily on an older 5GHz RB953G with second miniPCIe radio for 2GHz.
The MT APs I’ve seen come with License 4 which won’t support more the 25 concurrent users.
this is when you use usermanager for hotspot and you don’t have to. MT built in hotspot server handles as much as the hardware can support, which is more to do with throughput and limitation on number of WiFi connections to clients.
Also important, are these users all at the same time active? Or are they idle? That is VERY important! Or do they sit, and all watch YouTube movies all the time? Or just do mail check, Facebook updates etc…
You should know your users, what they do, how they spend the time online etc… From that you can calculate the “load” of the users, and then select the correct hardware.