Router or AP for SME

[iwod]

I am trying to source Router and AP for our company, office with 80 people in 3500 Square Feet. That is ~90 Wired Connections, and a potential of 100 Wireless Users with Phone, Tablet and Laptop.

My first question is how do SME / Enterprise Router works? Brands like Ubnt, Aruba or Rackus? Consumers Router's antenna are Omni-Directional, and with 3x3 antenna 802.11ac giving out a total bandwidth of 1750.

In a consumer scenario, where you have a few devices, you can share the 1750mbps bandwidth, since most mobile devices only has 2x2 and you are unlikely to be using it all at the same time. It wouldn't be much of a problem. Even with recent increase of one Mobile phones per family member, MU-MIMO will ease the problem.

But what happens on a SME AP? When 10s or even 100s of users are using it at the same time? It seems even with direction antenna wouldn't solve the problem. ( and would potentially cause coverage problem?? ) And even if you increase the amount of AP, lowering to 20 - 33 per AP. How do AP deals with it? Sharing the same 1750 with 33 clients? And why dont SME APs have 8x8 antenna? What number of maximum users should i be aiming at per APs? Wouldn't placing too many APs causes interference?

And is Wireless Roaming a standard features for all APs and Routers? I see Ubnt has something called Zero Handoff and Rackus has something similar but different name. But allows near zero packet drop when switching APs, ( Which is handy but i dont think i need ), normal Wireless Roaming with same SSID will do, but this information isn't avaible on the website. ( or Hidden )

It seems most of the information available on the internet are focused on consumers with very little on SME.

I understand for solution like this I will need to get a certified IT vendor to set up. I am not sure if I could do it myself just buying from Ubnt, but most of this questions has to do with my curiosity. I will very much like to know some of the details behind it.

P.S - I am not a professional engineer, so please keep it High Level overview if possible.

 

[System Error Message]

how much an AP can handle depends on its hardware speed. Before you go about choosing an AP or router you need to plan first. The difference between an enterprise router and a consumer one is that enterprise ones are much more reliable (you wont need to restart them and they wont hang), they have more features and they cope with the load much better. It also takes a lot more skill to set up an enterprise router and theres also a chance of screwing up badly in terms of network security but they are still much better than using a consumer router. The enterprise ones work by having more features, better features, better security and better hardware (they can use better wifi chips, better circuit designs, and are designed to handle business environment where there can be security breach attempts, lots of load, 24/7 uptime and such)

Before you go about getting them you need a few details first.
1) Total internet bandwidth (download+upload) is the minimum NAT speed your router needs to support
2) network features required. (i.e. MPLS, RADIUS, etc)
3) VPN if used, what speed do you want and type of VPN that will be used

Before you go for AP
1) Do you have an intranet with your own local services?
2) features you need for wireless
3) total number of clients/ expected bandwidth use
4) Do you have any sort of monitoring over network? This could be IP cams, sensors, lights, etc.

Whenever any wireless AP is overloaded one of a few things will happen
1) the AP freezes and needs a reboot
2) Some clients get disconnecteed
3) traffic on the AP crawls to a halt until there is less load/clients or it is rebooted

Is your office multi level or just 1 big room with multiple small rooms or cardboard semi walls.

Its a good thing that you've wired your office clients. I'll list a few things for you to consider.

In a business environment you should always use semi managed/managed switches. If you have like 100 wired clients than you will need 48 port managed switches with 10G or propietary stacking or trunked ports. Certain STP features are needed to help the traffic take the shortest path instead of the typical anti loop where the extra connections are only redundant.

If the environment is big enough or the load is big enough than you may want a few servers that perform different tasks aside from routing for example one could be a RADIUS server, DNS server, NTP server, web cache, network storage solely for logging, Seperate UTM from firewall and perhaps UTM on high end hardware for local traffic?, etc. This basically means setting aside an x86 or 2 box as servers.

One example setup would be Internet --> PFsense cache and firewall -> UTM --> mikrotik routing --> switch

On the switch you connect additional UTMs and other network servers that provide network services i mentioned. Because of the dynamic and flexible nature of mikrotik, you can connect them to multiple switches on the same network and they will still work in order to reduce the stacked traffic that heads towards internet and also route network services around the switch so they have redundant paths. UTM and firewall are extremely important while a cache reduces the required internet bandwidth and can be used to restrict downloads.

For the APs an example would be using a bunch of Ruckus APs or mikrotik indoor APs or good consumer routers as APs that are wired to the switches. If you have 300 wifi clients expected and you have 6 APs thats on average 50 perhaps 80 max and if the hardware has a fast CPU and sufficient RAM it will be able to keep up with the load and clients.