Wireless Access Point for a bar

tribz · 7 Apr 2012 at 17:01

What access point would you recommend for a small public bar area?

There is currently a linksys one in but people are finding it very slow which I think is down to the usage it gets. The connection is a 8MB's and the range only extends to the bar area. There is no housing nearby which could be leeching the connection.

I've used Drayteks in the past which have max kps settings per wireless connection but I think this would make it worse as it would simply limit everyone to a lower speed.

Would be interested in what you'd use in a situation like this.

Thanks.

Illusion · 7 Apr 2012 at 17:13

Depends how much you want to spend? Most consumer AP's suck when there is a lot of interference. How many users would you say are connected at once?

Tom's hardware did a review of lots of different ap's last year some time. You could look that up online?

tribz · 7 Apr 2012 at 17:26

Illusion said:
Depends how much you want to spend? Most consumer AP's suck when there is a lot of interference. How many users would you say are connected at once?

Tom's hardware did a review of lots of different ap's last year some time. You could look that up online?

I'd guess between 10-20 at busy times. I had to change the DHCP lease to an hour last year as it kept running out of IP's.

Price isnt really an issue. I realise I'm not in domestic wireless land now.

Dont suppose you have a link to that article? Had a search on Toms but couldnt see it.

Caged · 7 Apr 2012 at 18:58

You need something that can throttle connections and log who's been using it ideally, as well as being able to do stuff like blocking P2P.

I'd recommend going with The Cloud in a Box (https://cloudinabox.thecloud.net/home/), advantages of this are you get listed on their website, can use their promotional material etc, and they handle all the legal stuff. If you want to run it yourself then get either a Meraki MR16 or an Aerohive HiveAP 120.

I'm midway through deploying the Aerohive's and one of the SSIDs is for public access, so ask away if you have any questions.

ots3go · 7 Apr 2012 at 19:18

Also, with regards to running out of IPs, just put it on a larger subnet.

10.0.0.0/22 for example (255.255.252.0) will give you 1022 different usable hosts which with a sensible lease time I doubt you'll fill.

Lunawolfy · 8 Apr 2012 at 12:18

ots3go said:
Also, with regards to running out of IPs, just put it on a larger subnet.

10.0.0.0/22 for example (255.255.252.0) will give you 1022 different usable hosts which with a sensible lease time I doubt you'll fill.

This, increase the lease to 180-240mins and I don't think you'll have a pool issue.

With regards to Aps/Repeaters having a cap, is that such a bad thing? divide them equally amoungst the bandwidth then make sure you've got distant channel selection.

tribz · 9 Apr 2012 at 12:39

Thanks for the subnetting advice. The Cloud service looks like it could be useful, I'll get them to have a look at it.

Mikey · 7 Nov 2012 at 14:09

Caged said:
You need something that can throttle connections and log who's been using it ideally, as well as being able to do stuff like blocking P2P.

I'd recommend going with The Cloud in a Box (https://cloudinabox.thecloud.net/home/), advantages of this are you get listed on their website, can use their promotional material etc, and they handle all the legal stuff. If you want to run it yourself then get either a Meraki MR16 or an Aerohive HiveAP 120.

I'm midway through deploying the Aerohive's and one of the SSIDs is for public access, so ask away if you have any questions.

Currently looking at this for my work.

How reasonable are the costs etc?