Audience Wifi

[xllx]

I sometimes work for an event networking company. The reason they exist is because you can't just put in a d0mestic router or even worse multiples without doing some system design.

 

What a lot of people have said above applies. Ubiquiti, Cisco, Ruckus among others all have kit that will do it, choice is largely down to personal preference and budget.

 

For small (up to 100 or so) numbers of devices, we tend to use Cisco kit with a Meraki router, ideally to a dedicated feed, separate from any event networks. The Meraki routers are very nice, cloud based config, so if you need to tweak stuff, your network guru can be off site and connect in to sort things out.

 

Providing robust wifi is as much (or more) about handling the RF side of things than the IP side. Like radio mics, you need to think carefully about the RF environment, channels, frequencies etc. For instance, we quite often use multiple access points in an auditorium with the RF gain set very low, so as devices enter the auditorium they roam to access points other than the one nearest the door, this spreads the load. It is not unusual these days to discount the 2.4GHz band entirely as it is so congested in an urban environment, we often will only provide an assurance of quality in the 5GHz band.

 

If you want me to put you in touch with people who do this day in, day out for temporary events and long term installs, give me a shout.

[chelgrian]

D0m3stic kit is not going to cut it. Even professional access points bottom out at around 40 / 50 connections each.

 

If this is a one-off, I'd look at getting an external company in to provide it (think turnkey solution, rather than hooking up to your network), if it's an ongoing project then the solutions above would be a better option.

 

We've had over 150 connections to our Unifi system at once with over 100 associated with one access point and it worked.

 

You won't get very much throughput with that number of clients associated however. In ultra-dense deployments where you want some reasonable performance you tend to deploy more APs and yank the power down to limit the range. You can also cut very old clients of by disabling 802.11b which can dramatically improve things if such clients are present.

 

One useful feature of the unifi kit is that it can do per client rate limiting at the AP level.

 

As has been said elsewhere you also need to place the audience network logically outside the rest of your network and do appropriate firewalling.