Need wireless router recommendation for a school

[umar4444]

Hi everyone,

Im currently an IT apprentice at an english language school, and I really need your help.

Anyways, we have an internet problem over here. we have around 165 people in the building (150 students, 15 staff), and that means many laptops and phones. We are connecting to one wireless network. I know the router we have at the moment, cannot handle the amount connecting. Occasionally, the internet goes down, some devices cannot connect and I have to keep restarting the router. Well, this gets very annoying.

What I suggested was, that we get another internet connection that is for the teachers and the students can use the other one. So if the students connection goes down, the teachers/staff can carry on working without any problem


So, what do you guys think? What routers would you recommend for this type of situation?

Any answers will be greatly appreciated.

Thank you for taking your time to read all this

 

[bill001g]

It depends why the internet is going down. If there is some kind of problem with the wires or the the ISP then they need to get that fixed they should not fail on a regular basis. If you are going down because of router issue then that is different.

You must plan for how many people will be using the wireless device at the same time. 150 is WAY to many for even the best commercial devices. The number of wireless users per router/ap greatly depends on what they are doing. 10 people watching hidef video off netflix will put a lot more load than 10 people reading their facebook posts.

If you actually have 150 active users even if it is just simple web surfing I would call a professional company. You will need to a lot of wireless equipment...more than 10 radio units and the physical layout is critical.

What you want to do is add more wireless AP to your current router. The router will act as the connection to the ISP and all the other devices will only connect between this router and the users via wireless. You will want these devices on different radio channels. There really are only 3 usable 1,6,11. You want to set the channel width to 20mhz. If you have 5g capability it will help a lot since you have 2 radio in the same device which gives you 2 time the bandwidth. There are also may more 5g channels.

The goal is to increase your total number of radios. The tricky part is getting the users equally spread over them. You can manually do it with different SSID and put the burden on the users to connect to the best one or you can try to let the SSID be all the same and hope the automated client in the PC will pick correctly....it does not work real well. You can also I suppose put in a different AP for the staff but it will likely not make a huge difference.

Now what may happen after you fix the wireless up so you can get more users running at the same time you may run out of internet capacity. You will need to monitor and upgrade that if necessary. You do not really want a second connection just a larger one.

 

[umar4444]

It depends why the internet is going down. If there is some kind of problem with the wires or the the ISP then they need to get that fixed they should not fail on a regular basis. If you are going down because of router issue then that is different.

You must plan for how many people will be using the wireless device at the same time. 150 is WAY to many for even the best commercial devices. The number of wireless users per router/ap greatly depends on what they are doing. 10 people watching hidef video off netflix will put a lot more load than 10 people reading their facebook posts.

If you actually have 150 active users even if it is just simple web surfing I would call a professional company. You will need to a lot of wireless equipment...more than 10 radio units and the physical layout is critical.

What you want to do is add more wireless AP to your current router. The router will act as the connection to the ISP and all the other devices will only connect between this router and the users via wireless. You will want these devices on different radio channels. There really are only 3 usable 1,6,11. You want to set the channel width to 20mhz. If you have 5g capability it will help a lot since you have 2 radio in the same device which gives you 2 time the bandwidth. There are also may more 5g channels.

The goal is to increase your total number of radios. The tricky part is getting the users equally spread over them. You can manually do it with different SSID and put the burden on the users to connect to the best one or you can try to let the SSID be all the same and hope the automated client in the PC will pick correctly....it does not work real well. You can also I suppose put in a different AP for the staff but it will likely not make a huge difference.

Now what may happen after you fix the wireless up so you can get more users running at the same time you may run out of internet capacity. You will need to monitor and upgrade that if necessary. You do not really want a second connection just a larger one.

You were saying that i needed to add more access points. Would that include drilling holes through walls to add access points, if i wanted to add an access point in each classroom. we have 6 class rooms in the main building

 

[bill001g]

Yes in general you connect a AP back to a central switch or router via ethernet cable. Most professional ones are mounted in the middle of the ceiling of the rooms where there is not power so you need to run use devices that can also get their power over the ethernet cable.

Still if you want to do this on the cheap you can use any router as a AP.