Hi all.

What is the max amount of clients you connect on any 1 sector?

I was taught as a best practice to never put more than 30 clients per sector as this is considered as "overloading" the sector and the clients signal strengths and CCQs would start being affect negatively.

Is there any truth to this?

The sectors we use are various mikrotik boards (usually 433s) with cm9 radio cards and various 2.4GHz (vertical & horizontal) or 5.8GHz (vertical) sectors.

Just to be clear, I'm not asking what is the max you've ever connected. I'm asking what (if any) do you limit the sectors to and why.

Thanks.

I limit 15 point to multi point "average bandwidth" users per "AP radio" not by antenna type. The reason I do this is because its cost effective and it keeps happy customers. If I was selling 500k connections and did not have competition.. I probably would load them up to more than 30. No matter how fast your backhaul is just remember that every time more than one user is passing traffic your radio time is divided by that number on that AP radio.

My best advice is to put users on and watch and AVOID using one radio WDS repeaters.. your mileage WILL vary.

30 is not a problem if configured right with nstreme. 20+ is probably reasonable with RTS/CTS(have not personally tested) and 10-15 would be the max if using just regular old a/b/g.

nstreme is good stuff.. but i dont use it on AP since we have quite a few instant buy customers using PayPal and credit cards and down side is we lose the advertisement to laptops and iphones connecting and mikrotik clients are VERY pricey. I have found it to be a real plus when people open up a laptop or iphone and see 4 to 10 AP they can see and can connect to atleast one without configuring their device and we get 30% of those call for permanent installs and a monthly plan. So for us the old a/b/g stuff still paying the bills here. Once the N stuff bugs are worked out and appear to be more stable we will start looking in that direction on AP's but quaility and reliablity for us has stomped our competiion. We have not lost a single customer in over two years due to any service related problems. With those facts in mind I am very careful to push the limits of AP's for a short term gain in profits.

We try and limit our stuff to 40 clients per sector MAX, but.. the most important aspect seems to be their behavior. If everyone comes home from work and wants to stream television and movies, well, you're going to have a whole 'nuther ball of wax on your hands.

Adam

With NSTREME 40-50 is the MikroTik recommendation. I agree, more than that and ping times go really high.

What is the repeatable max ping time that you guys see on a sector that is fully loaded at forty clients per A.P.?

Rephrased, what do you think that the latency threshold is identified as?

Adam

A quick test showed 20-40ms with the odd one in the 200ms range. This AP has 44 users and with some interference and was running 2-3.5mb on a 10mhz channel.

Hummm... I did see that interference drastically exacerbates the problem; in our quiet neighborhoods deep in the forrest, our latency figures are fantastic with 30 clients on the A.P.

Adam

With NSTREME 40-50 is the MikroTik recommendation. I agree, more than that and ping times go really high.

Oh ok. Do they have a recommendation without NSTREME?

Keep in mind that one or few clients with "bad link" will screw up everyone on that AP, but if all clients have a "good link" it can go up to 40 per AP.

I agree, I think that when there is some one whom is marginal on the A.P. that the poller seems to "trip" on their link, although generally it does very well to distribute the access to the whole sector.

Got to keep the LOS clear and the interference away...

Adam

What is the typical tx ccq seen on a nstreme pmp link? Is anyone able to consistently run all supported rates on a client and still get a good ccq?

i am using tplink clients and seems to max out at 9-10 with latency going 600 plus and frequent drops. ccq varies gr8ly betn 15% to 70%. LOS clear for all clients. Distance not more than 2000 mtrs. Client antenna approx. 12 dbi. Routerboard 433ah with Compex a/b/g cards. Sectors 120 deg and 18dbi. Height of tower 130 ft above ground. Bandwidth given to clients varies from 256 kbps to 512 kbps.

I have a longish firewall rule dropping ports from 1 to 60000 which improved things somewhat but dunno if its right to use all the time. Customers have internal Wifi routers connecting avg. 5 computers/laptops in their premises. So number of simultaneous connections r on the higher side may be 40+ for each given client.

I am fedup sometimes thinking wireline was better than this.

i am using tplink clients and seems to max out at 9-10 with latency going 600 plus and frequent drops. ccq varies gr8ly betn 15% to 70%. LOS clear for all clients. Distance not more than 2000 mtrs. Client antenna approx. 12 dbi. Routerboard 433ah with Compex a/b/g cards. Sectors 120 deg and 18dbi. Height of tower 130 ft above ground. Bandwidth given to clients varies from 256 kbps to 512 kbps.

I have a longish firewall rule dropping ports from 1 to 60000 which improved things somewhat but dunno if its right to use all the time. Customers have internal Wifi routers connecting avg. 5 computers/laptops in their premises. So number of simultaneous connections r on the higher side may be 40+ for each given client.

I am fedup sometimes thinking wireline was better than this.

S.th. with your installation is very bad. 9-10 is a lightly loaded AP in our installations. We've RB600 with 3 Sectors in
5GHz + 1 Sector in 2,4 serving 100 customers without problem. Typical Customer is limited to 3MBit/383kBit.
Clients are all RB.

i think that has made the difference. RB clients work better than tplink etc. and my locality has 40 odd wireless AP's operating on 2.4 GHz. in a radius of 5 km. perhaps dat be a reason.

We just installed a customer literally a stones throw from the tower. In order to get the tx ccq to stabilize around 90% we had to limit the the data rates down to 24. The tower only has 2 customers on it so far, the noise floor is -101, the signal on tx/rx is 54/55. Is that normal? Is a lower transmit ccq normal, or am I actually too close to the tower/have too high a signal? i.e. I need to back off the the tx power.

made new post. realised i was hijacking a bit.

made new post. realised i was hijacking a bit.