amount of aps for lecture hall.

[navek]

I have been tasked to set up a lecture hall that seats 250 guest. I'm looking to see how many 1230g APs I would need to handle a full house. How many users per AP can the 1200 series APs handle. How much of a problem will there be with multiply APs in one room. Should I run these at the lowest signal strength and stagger the channels. Thanks for any help.

[bbaley]

Have you started with a site survey yet?

[thomas.bennett]

Now this is an over simplified response to your question but off the top of my head I would say 5 access points. That is a total of 270mb of shared bandwidth for the 250 guests to use.

Now this is assuming that each guest will have a wireless computer system and if they do each person will be given 1.08mb of "dedicated" bandwidth out of the shared whole.

Now this statement is also assuming that you don't have any significant network bottlenecks (logins, authentication, wireless security / encryption, special permissions, etc..)

Now 802.11g is probably different from 802.11b encryption (I haven't researched it still in an 802.11b environment here myself) but encryption for 802.11b will take away approx. 30% of the total bandwidth on an access point so if your going to turn on encryption of any kind take that into consideration that you will loose some bandwidth to the encryption and the fact that each client in the lecture hall will have to be setup to talk on that encrypted network.

Do be sure to stagger your channels but what you may want to be the most concerned about is in general too much signal in the lecture hall. Depending upon the size of your lecture hall you may be able to get away with lowering the mW output to 30 or even possibly 15mW and not have any problems with wireless signal and still have ample bandwidth to support up to 250 clients.

My suggestions are assuming:

*No encryption just basic Open SSID authentication

*No significant network login overhead

*No 802.11b wireless clients float in and force the access point to operate in an 802.11b mode (11mb) and force all the 802.11g clients in the same mode.

Once again on that third issue I haven't done alot of research on 802.11g and this may not be an issue any more but at one time it was a problem. With an 802.11g access point if an 802.11b client floated in then the access point went from 802.11g (54mb) to 802.11b (11mb) and so did the 802.11g clients aswell.

Hope this helps, hope I didn't confuse or give you any misinformation, but these are the issues I have come across with my Wireless LAN administration experience. :)

If I have misinformed this person please call me on it and give him the information he needs.

Thank you and have a nice day,

Thomas Bennett