How to determine the maximum number of access point clients?

Question

WiFi

According to the principle of "you programmer", they asked me to do something strange, to hang the entire small office on wi-fi (~ 20 devices). The old router can't cope and just goes into reboot at number 15. Not one access has the maximum number of clients that it can pull out. Is there any way to figure out what a piece of iron is capable of?
Or am I right, and this is not a very healthy idea? Convince to put devices on the wire?

Answer 1

Wi-Fi does not have such a parameter as "the maximum number of devices", all this is calculated for specific devices in a specific environment.
Affects:
- Distance between the client and the AP
- Distance between the clients
- Radio interference
- Antenna type
- weather on Mars
At a glance, I can recommend MikroTik cAP (from cheap options), but no one will tell you the number and location without floor plans and radio intelligence.

Answer 2

The fact is that at any given time, the access point (Internet center with an active access point) works with only one client Wi-Fi adapter from the entire Wi-Fi network. Data transmission takes place in half-duplex mode, i.e. in turn - from the access point to the client adapter, then vice versa, and so on. Simultaneous, parallel data transfer process (duplex) in Wi-Fi technology is not possible.
If there are two clients in the Wi-Fi network, then the access point will need to switch twice as often as if there was one client, because. Wi-Fi technology uses half-duplex data transmission. Accordingly, the actual data transfer rate between two adapters will be two times lower than the maximum real rate for one client (we are talking about data transfer from one computer to another through an access point over a Wi-Fi connection).
Fluke recommends no more than 7-10 users per access point.

Answer 3

www.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=272727
look at the characteristics of point antennas for distributed networks: in percent, chip and memory,
or directly Mikrotik forum, for example