Which APs are suitable for the job?

No wireless (or Powerline for that matter) connection will ever get anyway near the bandwidth the advertised speeds would suggest. Any claims are based on absolutely perfect conditions and won't include any of the overheads incurred in actually getting data from A-to-B.

A 100Mbps wired connection to a 2.4GHz 300Mbps wireless access point isn't going to be a problem.

There's some useful information over at SmallNetBuilder.
 
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What's the story with this Ubiquiti UniFi stuff then?

I'm guessing they're a halfway house between getting a few unmanaged home grade access points, and a proper managed Cisco/HP setup with controller etc?
Does the management software have to be always running on the server, or is it just used for initial configuration?
And being a halfway house not a proper managed solution, I guess clients will still drop for a bit when handing over between APs?
 
IIRC the software only needs to left running if you have it controlling guest access. For everything else the access points can be left to their own devices.

They're now advertising zero hand-off roaming, but I'm not sure if it only applies to the latest 802.11ac access points, or if it'll eventually be available for the older models.
 
I've never been that impressed with Cisco's Wi-Fi offerings anyway. I mean they're great if you already know Cisco but actual radio performance is lacking.

UniFi is fantastic for the money, but get the pro models so you can have proper PoE. Software version 3.0 will handle proper roaming between APs but it's not out yet, and as far as I know it will also work on existing hardware. With regards to the controllers, they will work without the controller being up but you lose a lot of functionality. If you don't want / can't have something on-site to run the controller then there's a very well documented method for installing it on Amazon EC2. Since only the controller traffic is going through this cloud controller the running costs per month are pence. I had a Windows Azure instance running some UniFi APs and it cost about £3 per month in compute time with no noticeable difference in terms of delays etc to the wireless clients.

Since v3.0 of the software allows you to set up multiple sites under one controller it's easy for you as a service provider to manage multiple clients Wi-Fi needs by having a controller running on unifi.yourbusiness.com and redirect the APs by adding a unifi. DNS entry to the DNS server your client is running.

Wi-Fi with hardware controllers is going out of fashion somewhat, most of the clever stuff is now being put on the APs and then lightweight controllers (VMs or cloud based) tie it all together. Cisco recently acquired Meraki who were one of the major players in this area.
 
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