I need to setup a hotspot for a rock music festival in an open soccer field; estimated 7,000 peoples will attend at same time.
The designed capacity is 1,500 concurrent mobile clients which is the wireless coverage maximum limit, WIFI is in place, I only need workout the ROS part, and configuration wise is very simple.

Hotspot: only need one hotspot server for all mobile clients and a simple login page triggers clients to login after agree the terms with a local shared user. No radius required. Session length, idle timeout and keep-alive time out need to be set to 1day, which means the hotspot will need keep track more than 1,500 active sessions even some of them don’t have any traffic. (Maybe will up to 7,000, I don’t know, everybody has a Wi-Fi enabled smartphone nowadays)

Filter: Nothing else other than the dynamic rules added by hotspot function, which are <20 in Filter Rules, and <20 in NAT I think. I might add few rules to drop P2P downloading and scan drop rules to protect the WAN port depends on the performance.

Queue: Only simple queue add by hotspot, one per active session. (Might grow to a huge number of queues)
No VPN, PPPOE, or any advanced routing is required.

So for this project, the minimum active sessions with traffic is 1,500 if the APs doesn’t crash (which is not my concern, other party is doing the coverage), and the session table on ROS will grow to 5,000-7,000(I guess? couz people come people go, and everybody will try to connect to the free WIFI). Internet Bandwidth is not an issue either, the design is 1Mb per session, 300Mb internet connection for now, if the peak time is too long, the host will deal with ISP for extra pipe.

I have few hotspot sites with 100-150 concurrent users running for years on x86 boxes, but this is my first time to setup such a heavy duty ROS hotspot environment. So could anyone with this kind of experience please tell me, will CCR1016-12 or RB1100AHx2 do the job? Or I will need to build an extreme powerful x86/x64 box to handle it, my concerts on x86/x64 is the stability and compatibly issues, I had some bad bad ROS experiences with the new x64 setups.

An 1100ah2 will handle this easily: Just logged onto one of ours, has 1135 active connections on a 100MB fibre, CPU is at 39%

This box often has 1800+ users, cpu maybe around the 50% mark.

An 1100ah2 will handle this easily: Just logged onto one of ours, has 1135 active connections on a 100MB fibre, CPU is at 39%

This box often has 1800+ users, cpu maybe around the 50% mark.

Thank you for you very important info. I'll set up a 1100AHx2 to give it a try.

Can you share how was rb110ahx2 performance when the 7000 concurrent connections happens?

Thank You.