FAP222B maximum clients

I do not know if they have a maximum specified number because too many factors come into play to give a solid number. As I see it Fortinet, Meraki, Cisco, and so on look to be right about 35 clients per AP on the main stream units. This is real world experience, not technical specification, regardless what they say. That being said I have 3x 220b and with one on a conference room table in a 20X60 room dead smack in the center with 20 laptops circled around it no more than 20ft away each most a few feet doing Yahoo fantasy football last year. 220b failed to keep all users connected. Every few 10-15 minutes several would drop and not even able to get back on. They had to reboot for some reason even after doing a repair or ipconfig release and flushdns still wasn’t able to connect. along with removing the ssid from manage networks on win7 still couldn’t reconnect until a reboot. every user in the 4hrs had to reboot once to 3 times. Remember we are not streaming or dong anything major. Just a few beers, lots of over talking, and 20 laptops on 1 ap all on yahoo.com. Just fantasy football. That being said, as far as my deployment with 3 in the building I never hear of wireless issues in 5z-10z connections . Roaming while streaming is light-years better than when I got these, when they first came out, and support on the phone didn’t even know half the cli commands on support calls.

You are freaking me out. I plan to use these APs outdoor in an opened area (swimming pool), not for 20, but for hundreds of users. I can' t imagine the situation when the clients are constantly calling me that their connection is dropping and dropping. Should I look somewhere else for wireless connection?

ibm_ioman, In your case, you need to put more than one AP. FortiOS 5.0 can load balance users between APs. This is not a Fortinet " problem" . It' s a Wireless problem. Each customer get a bandwidth and a channel for use. If you put a lot of users in a Radio, you will get problems. Remember that Wireless are a half-duplex communication. Each client have your time to send and receive traffic. If have so many clients, the network will be slow. If a client are far from a AP, a close client be harmed, etc.... 802.11g radio are a nominal 54Mbps. But, if you enable encryption, this will be reduced by half. With 25Mbps, if you have 10 clients, so theoretically you have only 2.5Mbps for each.... No comment about noise yet...... Wireless is not a perfect world... But a good design can help a lot... Regards, Paulo Raponi

Yeah, I know, this is why I plan to instal some APs one close to the other where is very crowded, and make the cells smaller. But I want an advise about the number of users to dimension in a cell. Also, I will limit the number of connections to the advised number, so the rest of the users to connect to the next closest AP.

If you can possibly, wait I would. The new 802.11AC protocol should be out this year. This is 2x3 time’s current capacity. For the size and cost of what you are going to do I’m sketchy buying 2X2 radios and a/b/g/n with what is coming out. I would look for bigger alternate solutions with less devices and more capacity. You might be pulled underwater :) by the cost of 15 APs with maintenance, contracts, replacement, and management of so many less powered devices over larger enterprise wireless solutions. I’m feeling helpful today. If time allows I will try and post something bigger like a wireless solutions that can handle a lot more devices per box so you would only need a few and not 15 or 20. (Not meant as sarcasm) I know you will need more than 5, 6, or 8 FAPs for Hundreds of devices…. What are the rough building dimensions or layout? Indoor / outdoor ?? Olympic stadium?? Arena stadium size?? YMCA ??

Hello, the setup is an outdoor pool. The wireless area that needs to be covered is about 3000 sqm, but again, there are areas where lots of people will be crowded on a small surface, and areas where not. The number of visitors is maximum 700 clients, and I would dimension for 300 wireless Internet users. (from the 700 clients, for example, mom, dad and child will come over, but they will have only one wireless device - hope so). I cannot wait as we must open within a month from now.

I have checked the documents. The total area that needs to be covered is around 2000 sqm, from which about 1000 sqm is the pool, in the middle of the surface. So the users will be around the pool, on about 1000 sqm.