We have quite a few AP One Mini’s and know that we have overlap with the signal but have configured the channels so that there is no interference, but we are seeing a lot of people connecting to one or two of the AP’s and not to others. With all of the connections, 30 - 40+ at times, we get a lot of dropouts and people not getting proper connections.
What I would like to do is implement the ‘Maximum Number of Clients’ setting but do not know what that would mean for devices connecting.
Would the first AP deny access and the device would connect to another AP that has availability or would there just be no connection?
What are the recommended number of connections per device? I seem to recall reading somewhere that 20 was the ‘limit’.
Any place that has recommendations for configuring the AP’s for best performance?
Any applications, Windows or Android that can be sued to determine wireless functionality that may help in making some configuration decisions?
It does sound like you have the concept here. Yes you will want to setup the AP Mini’s on different channels so that they will not overlap and will reduce noise/interference. Also to the best of my knowledge the Users will connect to the AP that has the strongest signal. There certainly isn’t a hard limit on the AP’s themselves but there is a recommended amount of 25 concurrent clients per device. The maximum number of clients can be specified within the devices themselves. Once the AP has the maximum connected clients future clients should then connect to the next AP with the next strongest signal. For best performance I would recommend setting a hard limit of 25. Also to ensure Noise/Interference you can also run a wifi scanner that will tell you the channels that are being used by other devices when choosing the correct channel to set to the AP Minis (Choose the channel with fewest devices on that channel). Drop outs may have occurred before because a AP Mini possibly was getting saturated and overdrawn. If you are still experiencing drop outs after setting hard limits please open a ticket http://cs.peplink.com/contact/support/ and we can certainly take a deeper look at the issue.
As Mike stated the recommended amount is 25 concurrent users. This is certainly not a hard number and have seen clients go above this and be fine. It all depends on how much bandwidth that you have. For optimum performance I would configure the AP One to only 25 concurrent users to be connected.
Yes, it’s possible to backup/restore AP One series each other using the same config.bin file.
Please be informed of the followings.
All the AP One series must be running the same firmware version. The latest firmware is 3.3.10 for all the AP One series as of 12/12/2013.
AP One 300 M has the most functions among other AP One models. Therefore, some of the functions that are dedicated to AP One 300 M won’t be reflected in other AP One models after backup/restoration and vice versa.