Question WiFi 6e Router with Large Address Reservation & Large Number of Devices ?

[mumulu]

I have an old Archer c3150 that has two main issue, i.e. a small table for address reservations and a limited number of devices per radio. The limit on number of devices is especially an issue for the 2.4GHz band, due to many home automation devices that only work on the 2.4GHz band. I try to avoid APs as our home is small enough that I really don't need them to extend range. To "future proof" I am mostly looking at WiFi 6e "routers" as they include 6GHz. Unfortunately, it's pretty hard to find information about the size of the address reservation table and max number of devices per radio. Hence, I am hoping someone here can give some recommendations. Btw, it would also be great to have a built-in VPN as this is how I access the home network when away.

 

[kanewolf]

I have an old Archer c3150 that has two main issue, i.e. a small table for address reservations and a limited number of devices per radio. The limit on number of devices is especially an issue for the 2.4GHz band, due to many home automation devices that only work on the 2.4GHz band. I try to avoid APs as our home is small enough that I really don't need them to extend range. To "future proof" I am mostly looking at WiFi 6e "routers" as they include 6GHz. Unfortunately, it's pretty hard to find information about the size of the address reservation table and max number of devices per radio. Hence, I am hoping someone here can give some recommendations. Btw, it would also be great to have a built-in VPN as this is how I access the home network when away.

Can you be more specific on "large"? How many DHCP reservations do you have now?
APs are good things. For example, you could have an AP that has your home automation devices, and that would leave the 2.4Ghz on your router to be less crowded. You IOT AP could be on channel 1 and your household on channel 6. All the IOT traffic would be "wired" from the router's perspective since the AP is handling the WIFI. I have a 1900 sqft house with 4 APs... You can have three APs together in the same location, as long as you manually assign channels to them, they won't interfere with each other.

 

[mumulu]

The address reservation table on the c3150 seems to be limited to 32 so I am looking for something that is larger than that. Next one up is probably 64 which is sufficient.

I don't have that many devices. Currently maybe about 45 which probably will increase to something like 60. I did start into problems where some 2.4GHz devices could not get IPs anymore. I believe it's related to having too many devices on 2.4GHz.

Frankly, I don't have much experience with APs. It's just that my wife probably will have to start managing this and so I am trying to keep it as simple as possible by just having one device. My brother-in-law was using multiple APs as his house is really big. It was always messy because the transition from one AP to another didn't work well.

 

[kanewolf]

The address reservation table on the c3150 seems to be limited to 32 so I am looking for something that is larger than that. Next one up is probably 64 which is sufficient.

I don't have that many devices. Currently maybe about 45 which probably will increase to something like 60. I did start into problems where some 2.4GHz devices could not get IPs anymore. I believe it's related to having too many devices on 2.4GHz.

Frankly, I don't have much experience with APs. It's just that my wife probably will have to start managing this and so I am trying to keep it as simple as possible by just having one device. My brother-in-law was using multiple APs as his house is really big. It was always messy because the transition from one AP to another didn't work well.

It is possible. Too many devices, generally will just slow things down to a standstill. But I don't have that specific router, so I am just guessing.
One suggestion is to look at getting a Asus router that is supported by Merlin second source firmware. One benefit of that is the maintainer answers questions on the smallnetbuilder forums. https://www.asuswrt-merlin.net/ You could ask about any DHCP reservation limitations from someone that has studied the code.

 

[lantis3]

Get a SBC device, install DietPi https://dietpi.com/

and setup a Pi-Hone DNS (with DHCP) server, I'm sure it can handle more than you need.

It also has several VPN packages.

 

[bill001g]

This is not a common things your normal home users does, most are too stupid to even know what a ip address is. Home routers therefore have fairly limited abilities.

It should not be related to the radio band you are running on and even if you were to use AP it would not solve the issue because a AP does not give out IP addresses.

Note there are 2 different issues here. The first is the simpler IP address allocation . This is a total for all the devices you attach via wifi or ethernet to the router. Generally you are limited to 254 addresses and some smaller number that you can have the router assign via a mac address. 32 fixed assigned addresses is actually quite a lot in a home install.

The second issue is the number of devices that talk to each radio chip. There is also some limit of connected devices but you tend hit a bandwidth bottleneck before you hit that limit. The problem is wifi is half duplex and the way the bandwidth is shared is all the end devices need to listen for each other and avoid transmitting at the same time. The more devices you have the more likely they are to accidentally stomp on each other. This problem tends to limit you well before you hit some limit based on the memory on the wifi chip.

So as recommended above maybe use a cheap device like a raspberry pi as your dhcp server if you need lots of IP reservation. It is not on the level of a microsoft domain server but it is much more advanced than any router.

If the issue is too many devices per radio chip you need to add more radio chips. There are router for example that have multiple 5g radios. Some commercial devices used to have multiple 2.4g radio chips also. In a home install it is going to be easier/cheaper to get AP to get more radio chips. You can put them next to the main router if the goal is just add more radio channels. Still there is only so much total bandwidth on the 2.4g band so you really can only use 3 radio chips with out them overlapping......and that assumes you use 20mhz radio bands and not 40.