# of Wireless nodes - ?

[raksasas]

I never was really involved in wireless that much until my last job. And I'm still a noob to wireless. It's easy to setup I do know as I have set up quite a few, but never to this scale

I have one main question that I seem to find a answer. How many wireless nodes can you have on a single access point? If it matters 802.11g.

 

[BollWeevil]

802.11 channels are like unswitched ethernet segments: multiple carriers, only one of them can talk at once, and if two try to talk at the same time, you get collisions. Even worse than plain ethernet, there are position-related problems such as the hidden node problem, where multiple clients are trying to talk to the same access point at the same time but are not aware of each other.

Since only one client can talk at once, your bandwidth is divided among the number of active nodes, and the collision rate increases. So why you may be able to associate many clients to a single AP, (I'm sure there is a hardware max for each vendor, but I've seen above 100), network performance significantly degrades the more users you have.

 

[VeeDubbs]

We just deployed about 50 APs where I work - HP 420. And HPs specifications claim they can hold 128 clients each. Haven't seen this yet - but thats what they say.