Business class router

Herm862001

New Member
Hey guys, My friend has a restaurant/bar & they need a wireless router to cover 100-200 people @ a time... any suggestions? They already have business class Comcast.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated. :)

Thank you for your time
 
Budget? WAN bandwidth?

For that many users you'd generally want a controller and a few access points.
 
beers. They want something that would be cost effective they have some $ to spend. What brand of products would you suggest for a controller & access points?

Thank you.
 
How much $ are we talking? Some solutions can get up there depending on what you want.

I'd roll with something like a Cisco 2504 for a controller and a few 3602i or 3702i APs depending on budget or if you wanted to offer AC instead of N. They'd also give you 3x3 MIMO and CleanAir capability to detect and avoid interference.

A cheaper option would be putting up a couple Ubiquiti UniFi APs which come with a 'free' software based controller that runs on Windows or Linux.

How big of an area is it? How much WAN bandwidth do you have to work with? Have you done a wireless site survey to get a rough estimate of the amount of APs you may need for coverage? Do you have someone familiar enough with the equipment to set up a segregated guest network? Do you have existing network equipment like PoE switches or would you need to locally power each AP at its location?

Kind of a lot of factors to consider if you want a 'proper' type of deployment instead of buying some random consumer grade router and blindly hoping for the best. You might be able to pick up one or two UAP-PRO or UAP-AC access points and run the software controller as a cheap pilot to see if it can do what you want.
 
A cheaper option would be putting up a couple Ubiquiti UniFi APs which come with a 'free' software based controller that runs on Windows or Linux.

How big of an area is it? How much WAN bandwidth do you have to work with? Have you done a wireless site survey to get a rough estimate of the amount of APs you may need for coverage? Do you have someone familiar enough with the equipment to set up a segregated guest network? Do you have existing network equipment like PoE switches or would you need to locally power each AP at its location?

Kind of a lot of factors to consider if you want a 'proper' type of deployment instead of buying some random consumer grade router and blindly hoping for the best. You might be able to pick up one or two UAP-PRO or UAP-AC access points and run the software controller as a cheap pilot to see if it can do what you want.
This was going to be my vote. The number of users per AP depend on what you expect the clients to me doing. If you expect them to do a lot of multimedia, you need a lower client-per-AP ratio, however if you expect people to connect their phones and only a small percentage to be using them at the same time, you can get away with more. From what I've seen, ~30-50 is the most you'd want connected per radio.

You can use an old PC running the free Ubiquity controller software, and I'd pick up dual-band UAP-Pro or UAP-AC APs.
 
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