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Possible Duplicate:
Can you help me with my capacity planning?

Let me say that I have already read a similar question here - High client density, low cost wifi network?

However, I do not have very low budgetary constraints. However, I am in India and specialized equipment gets to be exponentially much more expensive than in the US. Which is why I need to build it using home-grade wifi equipment.

I just need 100 users of a small office on two floors to be on the same LAN and be able to access the internet through a single fiber optic line. I'm perfectly fine drawing an ethernet cable to connect the various access points, if necessary.

Any idea how to do it ? My max bandwidth is going to be something like 8-12 mbps.

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Sandeep
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  • Does it have to be wireless? That's going to add a lot of cost, especially with consumer grade gear - even enterprise-grade APs have trouble handling more than a couple dozen concurrent clients, and with consumer-grade gear, you'd be lucky to get ten users per AP. On the other hand, you can pickup 2 or 3 48 port, unmanaged switches pretty cheap. (At least in the us, they're only a few hundred bucks a piece.) – HopelessN00b Nov 28 '12 at 15:31
  • My problem is wiring cost which is turning out to be pretty expensive for us. I was wondering if there is a way to get 4-5 30$ routers to able to route 100 users. It will prove to be big saving for us (and to avoid the problem of our wiring developing a fault - which is pretty common with the quality of wiring) – Sandeep Nov 28 '12 at 15:42
  • I'm not sure why this question is marked a duplicate of "capacity planning". I'm asking a question on how to do it with today's home-grade hardware which has gotten to be pretty good. There is not a single answer on serverfault which actually proposes a solution - every one of them asks you to buy commercial equipment. May I point you to AirJaldi if you want to see an example of hacking together a wireless network in the most inhospitable conditions. – Sandeep Nov 28 '12 at 15:44
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    ServerFault is unique in the StackExchange network in the way it's geared towards *professionals*. I realise your budget but no-one in their right mind would "hack together a wireless network" to use, reliably. 8-12MBps is not a lot but any consumer gear starts to fall apart once your approach double-digit connections. – tombull89 Nov 28 '12 at 15:50
  • A) No, there's not going to be any way to do this with 4 or 5 $30 routers. With consumer-grade gear, you'll need *at least* 1 per 10 concurrent users (and probably closer to one per 5 users) if you expect to provide a reliable connection, and at that point, you're going to run into issues with AP over-saturation. B) It got marked as a duplicate because it largely is. C) I would honestly recommend eBay (etc) where you could buy used or end-of-life enterprise-grade WAPs. You could probably run your wifi network on a few Cisco 1242 APs, and eBay has them for as little as $25 used or $200 new. – HopelessN00b Nov 28 '12 at 16:01

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If I were you I'd buy a couple MikroTik Routerboard RB751G-2HnD and configure them with WDS. MikroTik is a phenomenal value and I can testify to the fact that it's rock solid. Putting two of these in place should be able to shoulder the load you're looking to throw at it.

DKNUCKLES
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