One room, 30 wifi laptops, 2 access points...?

[GregPan]

(damn, just lost the whole post! New member!)

Hi there,
I need to setup a room with 30 wifi-connected laptops and a small application server (for audio transfers). I'm hoping for your advice and insight.

My basic plan is to setup a router as my primary wifi access point, offering DHCP (and eventually a connection to the Internet). The app-server will be wired to this (static IP), as will a second wifi access point, running on a different channel (use 1 & 11).

I'd then manually connect half the laptops to each wifi access point.

But is that the best way to do it? Are there other techniques to do this?
For example - could a single router offer 2 wifi networks on different channels (like the Airport Extreme does, but both 802.11g)?

Are 2 access points enough?
Are there any brands of access points that will do this particularly well?
Your insight is much appreciated!

[ryan461]

In my experience you cant really pick an AP if they're using the same SSID. A single router (assuming its a soho brand like linksys) running 30 clients would be slow and unstable. You might be able to setup the second one using a different SSID and channel, but don't do NAT on it, that way DHCP can be forwarded through it.

As for brands, well if you can get say a wrt54g linksys and flash it with dd-wrt, you'll have lots of configurability

[TheOgre]

You mentioned audio in your OP. If 30 laptops are going to connect to a single app server over WiFi on 2 APs, you'll either have to limit the bandwidth to each wireless client that connects, or add another 5 or 6 APs to your network to handle the load. If you spread the APs out around the room and decrease the power output (on the AP), you'll be able to "force" a limited number of clients in the immediate vicinity to connect to the nearest AP, thereby creating a kind of "managed" wireless network. If the laptops start moving around the room, then that'll defeat the purpose of what I just described.