We are implementing a Hotspot wifi solution at a camp site. The Buildings are 3 floors with 16 rooms in each floor. There are 16 buildings like that. Every room can have up to 10 people. So at peak times every floor has 160 individuals that could use this Wifi service. I'm designing to service that number.
The overall consensus is that the network is slow. So i'm currently tacking the AP setup . I found that the channels were setup to 'Auto' causing them to interfere with one another.
We have set up 2 AP of TP-link EAP120 on each floor. Unfortunately the engineers have setup 8 SSID for each AP. So you have rooms A-1 to A-8, then A-9 to A-16 for the first floor of building A and on we go. This was causing overload see link below.
The AP, http://www.tp-link.ae/products/details/cat-4908_EAP120.html supports 2.4 GHz and 8SSID per AP.
1) The many number of SSID on each AP is causing overload. The average allowed bandwidth for each user is 500kbps or 1mbps. http://www.revolutionwifi.net/revolutionwifi/p/ssid-overhead-calculator.html
The data sheet mentions 8 SSID per AP but that causes overhead. I want to service 160 users. So considering that rule of thumb of 20-25 users/SSID i need to have 4 APs per floor with 2 SSID each so that i can reach the 160 users?? 4APs * 2 SSID each * 20 on each SSID = 160 users??
2) I'm setting adjacent SSIDs to run at distinct 1, 6, 11 channels for minimum interference. However i'm not sure how i can service 160 humans per floor. What is the proper way to handle this? Say First floor AP SSID 1 at channel 1, then SSID2 at channel 6, then AP2 SSID1 at channel 11, AP2 SSID2 channel 1 - what is the minimum distance from AP1 is required to reduce interface with AP1 SSID1 already at channel 1??
I know i'm asking lots of questions but here they are in summary
- How to service 160 users/floor. how many AP and SSID are needed?
- What is the channel distribution of the SSID/AP
- What is the physical distance apart?
- Is that AP even a good enterprise choice. Or should we switch to another one that many supports 5 GHz.
The bottom line is that users are complaining about the network connects/reconnects and how slow it could be once we have 500 users on the network. I understand that we have the main router firmware and the software to worry about but i'm focusing on the APs for now to eliminate any problem they might introduce.
