what is the maximum number of 802.11B wireless clients that can connect to the 2820 ?

Hi

I don't think there's any numerical upper limit designed into 802.11 standard as such, but there would come a point where too many clients would start to congest things. Taking things to the extreme (for the sake of this 'thought experiment) with a massive quantity of clients, even just all the handshaking activities will start to count as a significant quantity of traffic over what is a limited sized pipe (the data carrying capacity of the wireless channel; more on that down a bit). Back in the real world, there will be a balance where you'd have to assume some will be sleeping, some will be handshaking and some will be sending/receiving traffic, so that (and what the people are using the wireless for) would govern how many the link can realistically deal with.

My information on capacity is that when you consider the overheads of 802.11g wireless encapsulation, the actual data carrying capacity of a 54 Mbit/s 802.11g link will be nearer to 34 Mbit/s (or thereby) of Ethernet traffic (it depends on what's in the 802.11 packets; lots of smaller ones are worst case as each still has the overheads of the encapsulation). If there are 11b clients in the area, this situation becomes worse as the capacity drops even further due to the requirement of the system to add protection (so 11b clients don't try to send data whilst 11g clients are doing so). From memory, I think the worst case scenario could take that 34 Mbit/s for the 11g traffic down to half that capacity. Bearing all the above in mind, the size of the pipe is a lot smaller than you think and could thus be congested relatively quickly. Of course, I'm politely ignoring 11n as I've not fully read up on it yet! The other reason is that in the real world, most clients will still be 11g and thus that's the bottleneck that should be considered.

Of course, the other limit would be how many IP addresses the Draytek can issue to them, so that depends on your address range and also the Draytek's DHCP server capabilities.

Bri

PS Please excuse any typos, but I'm using one of these new-fangled iPad things!

Hi ,
I've come across a few older style routers that would only allow 16 wifi connections. There is nothing mentioned on any literature i can see .

I've got to connect 60 x 802.11b devices + a bunch of G/N. Data throughput is not a huge issue .. more the allowing of these connections to register. Was just wondering if the current Vigor we have will allow that many.

Hi

Well I'm certainly not aware of any ceiling in the Draytek firmware, but I'm certainly not one of the Draytek experts (and I use a Cisco 1252 WAP as opposed to the Draytek internal one) but I'd expect it to cope with that. To be honest, if you're that reliant on wireless, you might be a lot better with a proper WAP as if nothing else, you can then mount it somewhere that will give you optimal radio coverage (particularly if you get one that handles power over Ethernet as that saves being constrained by the location of mains sockets). If it's a large building, you could even use it far away from but in addition to the Draytek's internal one (using the same ssid but a different channel) to give you a greater coverage area and also split the cliens over both devices (assuming they're suitably scattered throughout the building). Remember that there are only three non-overlapping channels if you do that (so use only 1, 6 or 11)

Bri

PS I've just noticed that the above question was your first post, so welcome to the Draytek forum!!