School Deployment 500 users AP?

[periko]

Hi.

I want to setup a pfsense server for a school, they are 500-600 wireless users+20 LAN.
  My question is about access point.

I have been searching in different sites about what access point products can support this amount of users, linksys, netgere, tp-link have products for home, I don't want users to complaint that the system close their connection or cannot connect and latter find out that the AP reach his limits.

I had made my task, I will need +/- 5 AP, this are like "business level", some one could point a good product that support this amount of connections?

I will appreciated, thanks!!!

[ZGamer]

This probably should get moved to "General Discussions".

That being said, it all depends on budgeting, AP/User density, how many features you want, and how much time you want to spend.

If your looking at 20+ clients/AP doing a fair amount of load then I would be looking enterprise style-APs from Aruba/AeroHive/Meraki/Cisco/ect. Each has their pro's/con's but generally in smaller deployments I would probably go with AeroHive/Meraki as with the cloud-based controllers it is a simple web-page for site-wide management.

If low density and you don't mind the overhead, I'd probably run whatever cheap AP's that have decent reviews capable of running DD-WRT.

Always remember you can do a large amount of filtering with pfSense to reduce the load on the AP's via per-IP throttling via QoS (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Usi195rK35I), country filtering, Squidguard plugin can take of filtering out the adult sites and such, ect…

[periko]

Always remember you can do a large amount of filtering with pfSense to reduce the load on the AP's via per-IP throttling via QoS (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Usi195rK35I), country filtering, Squidguard plugin can take of filtering out the adult sites and such, ect…

This is one of mi priorities, thanks Patrick_ for your excellent info.

[robi]

To cover large areas Ubiquiti UniFi is a great solution.

[jimp]

While I don't have any direct experience with them, I have heard from quite a few people who used Ubiquiti equipment in such deployments that they work great and are quite affordable compared to other similar choices.

[periko]

Thanks all of u, love this forum!!!

[RudiMM]

General discussion; agreed.
I would and do recommend the Aruba Instant Wireless 105 (2x2 MIMO).  Does not require a controller, cloud or physical.  The 135 is a 3x3 MIMO, but may be overkill.  Be careful about layout in 2.4gig spectrum.  Remember you need gig switch interfaces and 802.11af.

Rudi