Commercial/Enterprise WAP for ICHQ
primesuspect
Beepin n' BoopinDetroit, MI Icrontian
As the years have gone by, more and more people bring wireless devices to Icrontic events; a given person might have a smartphone, laptop, and a handheld gaming system on WiFi at some point.
I've yet to find a WAP that can handle the load. I've built a Smoothwall that is fairly beefy to handle the LAN gaming that we do (60+ people sometimes), but the Wi-fi almost always flakes out and I have to do the annoying "reboot the WAP" dance.
I want to end this problem once and for all. I'm wondering if anyone has FIRST HAND experience with any enterprise/commercial-grade WAPs that they can share.
I can Google/Newegg as well as the rest of you; While I appreciate a Newegg link to "This looks like it will do what you need...", I'd much rather have advice from someone who has actually used the device they're recommending.
Thoughts?
I've yet to find a WAP that can handle the load. I've built a Smoothwall that is fairly beefy to handle the LAN gaming that we do (60+ people sometimes), but the Wi-fi almost always flakes out and I have to do the annoying "reboot the WAP" dance.
I want to end this problem once and for all. I'm wondering if anyone has FIRST HAND experience with any enterprise/commercial-grade WAPs that they can share.
I can Google/Newegg as well as the rest of you; While I appreciate a Newegg link to "This looks like it will do what you need...", I'd much rather have advice from someone who has actually used the device they're recommending.
Thoughts?
0
Comments
Edit: if the retired ones don't work out, this seems baller
That is what Brian needs.
http://www.microcom.us/ns5.html
I need to figure out the differences between the models. Thanks for the recommendation!
But I'm curious how did you calculate out 18 AP's are you trying to cover several city blocks or are you running things inside a mirror maze filled with solid concrete walls?
4000 sq. ft
no redundancy
answer = 6 APs for each segment.
The problem here actually breaks down into two categories;
-Capability of the AP to handle signal diversity
-Capability of the AP to handle high packet rate
The problem is that most of the things we do at ICHQ are fairly high packet rate (TF2, WoW, etc.) To be specific; just 4 people playing WoW will be roughly equivalent to 1500 packets per second and upwards of 50 entries in the state tables. That's just four people playing WoW, not counting any other devices like phones, people playing on Steam, Vent, etcetera.
Throughput numbers are more or less meaningless when it comes to PPS. There's a million and one ways to game it (and I have done most of them.) Smoothwall does not understand PPS or graph it so I have to do the estimates from my pfSense data and what I know about the applications. And again, remember that almost all of this traffic is going over the sole AP currently.
If we call WoW at 350pps+, TF2 at 200pps (way more if local server), streaming Twitter at about 25pps, and guesstimate the rest reasonably that means that at the last event at ICHQ we were trying to push somewhere north of 4000pps through the AP with somewhere north of 1000 entries in the state tables and I believe Brian said he showed 26 devices connected at one point. When we reduced the PPS load on the AP by moving laptops to wired connections, the AP more or less quit flaking out. (Beyond it's normal flakiness.)
So taking ALL of this into account, here's what we need to know from prospective APs:
-Maximum TCP State entries supported
-Maximum PPS rate supported
-Recommended maximum endpoints (connected devices)
And guess what most APs don't publish in their specs? *sigh*
I am very skeptical of the NanoStation5 behaving much better, if at all, if only for the low powered CPU. By comparison, your typical WRT54GS is packing a 200MHz+ Broadcom SoC with 32MB RAM and 8MB NVRAM on the most desired DD-WRT hardware (v2.x and v3.0.) The NanoStation5's specs are closest to a WRT54G v1.0. Code optimization can only get you so far when you get into hard limits, and states must be no less than X bytes in RAM.
The Aironets would probably do better on the hardware front save that obtaining firmware updates for them is pretty much impossible. Especially 1100 family. They're EOSL, and they run IOS only. Depending on model, they may also be dependent on a Cisco Wireless Access Controller running Unified Wireless Access - a separate rackmount system for authentication (even when only using WPA-PSK2.) Plus someone with IOS knowledge is needed to configure and maintain them anyway.
That said, a 2-3 AP solution actually makes the most sense to me. Believe it or not, 26 devices is extremely high for any AP. The Aironet 1231 recommends an absolute maximum of 8 calls active per 1231 running lossy G.729 and 7 for G.711 regardless of operating mode (that's all of 400pps, too.) For all 1231's the recommendation is to never exceed 25 devices per AP and to prefer 15 devices. ( See http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/voice_ip_comm/cuipph/7920/5_0/english/design/guide/wrlinfra.html#wp1040697 ) And that's a very pricey enterprise class AP. I can tell you from experience, that the 1231 should be treated as having a very hard limit of 15 devices - past that they get very twitchy, with frequent stalls and drops. I'm on those when I'm in the office.
So, figure typical prosumer AP will tap out at 15 devices, consumer APs lower. I think the best solution may be a combination of wired with some mid-level switches - wouldn't even need to be gigabit, really - and 1-2 APs. Just getting the device count down that way should put the load where it can be handled better. Like I mentioned, seemed that the AP stopped freaking out on such a regular basis as soon as we moved I think it was 5 of us to wired.
Just my $0.02 of course.
For all that bandwidth though how bigs your pipe? Sounds like based on what your suggesting your pipe will stutter before your AP threshold is hit.
http://www2.proxim.com/wireless-lan/orinocor-ap-8000-and-ap-800.html
We've installed a few of their AP-4000MR-LR Outdoor Mesh AP's and the gear is top notch.
http://cgi.ebay.com/Proxim-ORiNOCO-AP-4000-8670-US-Wireless-Access-Point-/220727426512?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item3364613dd0#ht_500wt_1086
You might need 2 still due to antenna/signal diversity, but this model will handle the rest. (The non-mesh has 2 antenna points; mesh has 6.) That's a 4000 8670-US which is the top end non-mesh. You will need separate antennas which use standard N-type connectors; easily found cheap. I can vouch for Proxim being top shelf stuff.