................ Note also that it is recommended to keep the MAC adress
of VAP as similar (interms of bit values) to the MAC address of the physical interface it is put
onto, as possible, because the more different the addresses are,the more it affects performance.

That is a quote from manual, for 2.9.

I want to setup 4 virtual ap's for a RB133/R52H, NAT-ing about 40 customers, on a 3-8 mbit wireless network.
The mac addresses are totally different ( it is an inherited migrated network. Some customer ap's connect by MAC also. Pain in the ...... to change them all.)
Will this affect performance MUCH more than if they were very close ?
Will be better to setup 2 wireless cards with 2 virtual ap's each ? (In the area there is a crowded spectrum.)

Would it be better to consider x86+wireless cards instead of RB133 ? ( meaning, much better ? )

( I already searched trough the forum, found nothing to resemble this.)

Tx. all.

This is a good question. I too would like to know the anwser. I wander how many vAP's can be assigned to a card and how performance is effected. How much Hp is needed to do this. Maybe a RB333?

Yes, but the "officials" want to keep it secret.
I put 2 routerboards 133, with 2 vap each one. Unfortunately. It runs just fine.
But for 4 vap, i did not have the courage to try it on a rb1xx.
I put 3 vap on x86, pii500, and it runs fine. But they are only about 25 clients on that ap, and the traffic is light. Just around 4 mb. They don't use more.
So, we're about to test ourselves and find out what's the performance chart for multiple vap....

Well I guess we are going to try it with a RB333 with one xr2 card. I am going to set it up for 3 vAP's. I have about 80 clients running at present, so Im going to break them up to about 25/30 per vAP. Each vAP is going to have its own speed Limited to 256k/384k/512k. This way I hope to get away from all of those que's I have set for each client. There is probaly a better way of doing it but I got to learn the hard way I guess.

may I ask , whts the real advantage of making vap ? i know we can make many VAP on a single interface , but why ? is it to make many SSID's ? is it to seperate users from each other for more security ?

Well for me it is to separate different clients. Set up different speed values. Make things easer to manage when I set up Real AP's Right now freq assignments are tight but later maybe available.

You can of course use like this:

Primary scope would be of course separating clients, or putting clients grouped on a whatever your criteria is.
Or, you can make a bridge btw. a vap and another interface, without disturbing other clients. Bridge only the ones you want. Your imagination is the limit.

so what are real life results with more VAPs on single interface? Theoretically - VAPs make you slower because you ahve to send beacons for all the vaps but how much impact it will have in real network i cannot say.

yes janisk that's what i was thinking of , virtual things always take more resources , so using 2 wlan cards is away better from using single card with virtual AP on it , i'm talking about big networks 100's of users ..

Actually, samsoft, that is not always correct. For 100's of users you could not probably use a single wireless card to connect them all, and still have good traffic, be it with virtual ap or not. So, that would not be a choice. Plus of that, if you connect more wireless cards, just to have separate client groups, you must use more channels, and have less spectrum available.

For me, 30 to 45 users on a single access point, i have about 2 vap on each of 4 ap's, each on x86 hardware. Cards are tp-link atheros 5212 or r52. The traffic does not seem bothered at all by this.
And I am actually using that thing up, with the commercial, on 5 or 6 ap's.
I also am using 2 vap, on two location, just cause it helps me keep some of my "smart" clients from giving me trouble. Changing ip's, putting them static, or putting their dhcp on.
So, with 2 vap for a interface, on x86 everithing is just fine.
In excange, i put 1 vap on a rb133c, and i had to get rid of it at all. about 20 client, sharing 4 mbit, on the wireless part, routing. It was working ....... weird. With 2.9.38 up to 2.9.45. Put 3.0rc5 and rc6 on it, and it got worse. Just could not use it. So, now is a cpe with 2.9.46. With 2.9, as ap, it was having 20-40% cpu, with routing and firewall. But clients complained about high ping and low traffic. So i changed it.

Anybody else's experiences ?