Wireless connection needed for about 600 concurrent connections

gomaze · Sep 9, 2014

All,

I am looking for some help in knowing if Smoothwall or other Router OS option will be able to meet my needs for an upcoming project.

Situation:
Holding a community service event that will have about 600 people at, all with cell phones but in a location with no cell service, regardless of provider.

Goal:
Provide a wireless connection that would allow people to have access to the net to do general items, such as: Post photos, facebook, twitter, etc.

Idea:
I know that a standard router, or even a couple of routers would get crushed in trying to manage all of these connections at one time. The thought is to have a PC that can serve as the router, because of the improved hardware resources.

Questions:
Has anyone done this type of thing before with any success? Does Smoothwall or other Router OS option have the ability to handle this type of load? If so, what wireless card(s) need to be installed in the PC to handle about 600 concurrent connections?

Misc Items:
Everyone will be in a small enough space to be in range of a central access point. Overall bandwidth is not a concern at this point as everyone will not be on online at the same time. No computers need to have the ability to talk to each other on the network. I will want to have QoS running to ensure a select few people have access when they need it. Budget is a concern as there is none. I will be providing the PC and willing to spend some money on required wireless NICs.

Any help that you can provide would be awesome!

Thanks!

abailey · Sep 9, 2014

I would use professional router and AP's. I would not try to use a PC with software loaded on it for an event like this. I like Ubiquiti. So I would recommend the Ubiquiti Edgerouter Lite plus several AP's. Most consumer AP's can handle about 25 to 30 people max. Ubiquiti AP's (for general use like you describe) can serve about 100 people each. I don't know of any AP that can handle more than 200 connections at a time. If you are talking 600 people in a relatively small area you need to really plan well as you will have to put in many AP's and turn down their power so they do not interfere with each other. If you are not versed at setting up this kind of thing I would encourage you to hire someone to design it and set it up.

gomaze · Sep 9, 2014

Please see updated details about the post in that there are major budget constrains. Buying new equipment for a onetime event is currently not an option at this time.

abailey :

abailey · Sep 9, 2014

Wow you have quite a challenge given your goal vs your budget. A PC set up as a router can certainly handle the routing for 600 users. You have two major problems to overcome, though. The first is that most wireless NICs are not made to be AP's. Meaning they don't have the chip sets to support many users. Most won't even support 30 users. Also a decent wireless card is at least $50, a nice one around $100. The second major problem is that in the 2.4Ghz band you have only three Non-overlapping channels. These channels are 1, 6, and 11. So even if you could find cards that would support like 50 users each, you could only have three in the PC as any more would interfere with each other. Even on different channels, putting them so close to each other with Omni antennas (which all the wireless NIC's come with) will cause some interference with each other. The only thing I can think of that may work ok would be to get something with directional antennas. The least expensive solution that I can think of that may work from a central location like you are talking about would be 6 Ubiquiti Nanostation Loco M2 devices. They have a beam of 60 degrees each. If you put them in a circle and alternate channels 1,6,11 so that devices do not have the same channel as the device to the left or right of them, adjust the power accordingly, set the max that can attach to each one at around 100, and use your PC as the router, then it may work. You will still get some interference and load balance issues. The Loco M2 cost about $50 each so that would be $300 for 6 of them.
Your project is difficult to say the least. Maybe someone else has experience with a different approach they can share.

abailey · Sep 9, 2014

Another thing to think about is a standard class C network (like most people are used to) can only have 254 IP addresses. I don't know your knowledge of networks, subnets, or routing. If you are up on that stuff then this is not a problem as you can just use a class B network or use several class C networks on different subnets to accommodate all the users. Just another thing to think about.

gomaze · Sep 9, 2014

Using a class B network design is what I had in mind to handle the volume of connections. I was looking at getting a few of these guys to handle the connection load: Intel 7260HMWDTX1 Dual Band Wireless-AC 7260 PCIe. The computer I have has two open PCIe slots. What I don't know is if the cards can handle the load and the best software to run that will complete the setup.

Any extra thoughts?

Thanks!

abailey :

bill001g · Sep 9, 2014

You are likely better off not wasting money on 802.11ac cards. More than likely most your clients will want to use 2.4g so I would run both cards on 20mhz band channels in the 2.4g range. You would be much better off spending any difference on a third card if you can find a way.

You are massively over the limits I have ever designed wireless for. You can have many devices associated with a AP as long as they are idle. The number of active users is very dependent on what they are doing. The normal recommended number of machines is 10/radio and that is for light surfing traffic. You get even a single user streaming hd video and it will greatly degrade everyone else.

The limitations on how much traffic/users/connections you can have is not so much a router or pc limitation it is the radio chipset. A PC will not be able to handle more wireless users just because it has a faster processor and more memory. Almost all wireless functions are handled by the firmware loaded into the radio chips themselves, if you look at any of the third party firmware release like dd-wrt they are loading exactly the same drivers you load in a PC. There is no source code to these it is a binary file loaded to the chip itself and it is identical in most cases.

You are really going to have to dig though the chipset manufactures data sheets to find devices that can run with that huge number of users. I suspect there are limitation of the number of unique mac addresses they can store.

In short I suspect very strongly you can not accomplish what you plan to do with that small amount of equipment.

USAFRet · Sep 9, 2014

In addition to the above mentioned question of 600 (!) devices, what is the pipe to the outside looking like? Dozens or hundreds of people talking to FB/twitter/instagram and uploading pics and video, and even just scrolling a Timeline with the dumb autoplay, are going to seriously strain anything but a major pipe to the outside.

gomaze · Sep 9, 2014

Just did a test on the pipe that we will be using for the internet connection and i am getting 65Mb up and down. I also was suggested to look at a solution of the following:

It's all about the upstream bandwidth; not the device count. Unless you've got something like a 100Mb link, no router will need to break a sweat. On the other hand, no router will provide a satisfactory result if the upstream connection is too slow. What kind of connection will you have?

This could be an easy job for a small SuperLumin cache set up as a transparent proxy if a significant fraction of the expected load is streaming media or other cacheable content. SuperLumin "Nemesis" is a software appliance that installs on any 64bit dual-core with 4-8GB of memory and a 120GB disk. The smaller the upstream link, the more useful an SSD would be at masking a small upstream link and minimizing http 40x errors. SSDs are generally discouraged for permanent installations because the intense I/O will destroy them after a few months. It sounds like your doing something temporary enough that this won't matter.

The one problem I anticipate is that a SuperLumin cache needs static addresses. Without a static upstream IP, you would configure dhcp to make Nemesis everyone's default gateway and configure Nemesis to connect to the internet through a separate router. (Single nic in the cache; all devices on one subnet) Any spare wireless or other router would do. That could also give you a separate (hidden) ssid for the select few to bypass the cache as a sort of QoS strategy. Everyone else would connect to a wireless router set up as a simple access point and run through the transparent proxy cache.

USAFRet :

abailey · Sep 9, 2014

Hmm, sounds like someone is trying to sell you something. The cache only works when you have many people going to the same sites doing the same things. This works well especially in a corporate environment where you have people going to the same sites several times a day, day after day. This is also putting the cart before the horse. If you don't have an infrastructure that can support the connection of hundreds of devices then it really does not matter how much bandwidth you have since most won't be able to connect anyhow. If you truly are going to only use 2 NIC's for clients to attach to, then most likely you won't be able to get more than 60 clients to attach so the 65Mb/s should be fine. To make sure you could use your PC to do a little traffic shaping so you can specify the max amount of bandwidth each client can use.

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