What is the max number of concurrent wireless connections on an Asus rt-n66u?

[Jusmop]

To clarify - I'm talking about the max number of client connections, not TCP/UDP connections. In other words, the number of devices that can be wirelessly connected concurrently.

I'm running Merlin 380.63_2.

Is this limit in hardware or firmware?

TIA.

 

[CaptainSTX]

To clarify - I'm talking about the max number of client connections, not TCP/UDP connections. In other words, the number of devices that can be wirelessly connected concurrently.

I'm running Merlin 380.63_2.

Is this limit in hardware or firmware?

TIA.

Other things need to be taken into consideration. What are the clients going to be doing? Big difference between streaming video or just checking e-mail. Also depends on bandwidth that you have from your ISP. How congested for WiFi is the area where this router is going to be? How big an area needs to be covered? The bigger the area and the more obstructions the lower the link rate will be and probably fewer clients can be served.

All things considered 20 is probably a realistic number though everyone's results will vary.

 

[Nullity]

With my RT-N66U (in AP mode) I commonly have ~20 clients with no problems. Everybody has Smart TVs, Rokus, Chromecasts, phones, tablets, laptops, printers, etc, etc nowadays. I handle ~40 clients during the holidays.

I'm unsure what the hard limit is, but I would expect ~100 to be kinda pushing it. IIRC, toastman (a tomato firmware dev) has ran over 100 clients on hardware older than the RT-N66U (WRT54G?).

 

[sfx2000]

To clarify - I'm talking about the max number of client connections, not TCP/UDP connections. In other words, the number of devices that can be wirelessly connected concurrently.

I'm running Merlin 380.63_2.

Is this limit in hardware or firmware?

My rule of thumb is pretty much a max of 25 clients per radio with most AP's - some routers will start dropping clients (wired and wireless) as low as 32, but most modern consumer routers can handle 50 total depending on traffic and usage.

With WiFi - it's mostly driven by air time capacity...

 

[Jusmop]

My rule of thumb is pretty much a max of 25 clients per radio with most AP's - some routers will start dropping clients (wired and wireless) as low as 32, but most modern consumer routers can handle 50 total depending on traffic and usage.

With WiFi - it's mostly driven by air time capacity...

Thanks sfx2000, Nullity, and CaptainSTX for your comments.

I guess I should have given some context up front. I'm not talking about setting up a new network here. I really just want to know what the max number is. In other words, at what number is an existing connection to a device dropped in order to make a connection to a new device (or the new connection disallowed).

The reason I ask is because I have some LIFX bulbs that occasionally lose connection which is annoying. The LIFX support pages mention that wireless routers often have a hard limit on the number of wireless connected devices. I am wondering if I am running into this limit with the rt-n66u. I typically have 25 devices on my network - around 15 wireless and 10 wired.

 

[Nullity]

Thanks sfx2000, Nullity, and CaptainSTX for your comments.

I guess I should have given some context up front. I'm not talking about setting up a new network here. I really just want to know what the max number is. In other words, at what number is an existing connection to a device dropped in order to make a connection to a new device (or the new connection disallowed).

The reason I ask is because I have some LIFX bulbs that occasionally lose connection which is annoying. The LIFX support pages mention that wireless routers often have a hard limit on the number of wireless connected devices. I am wondering if I am running into this limit with the rt-n66u. I typically have 25 devices on my network - around 15 wireless and 10 wired.

I'd say something like 255 might be the hard-limit. Regardless of the number of clients you could possibly overload the RT-N66U by saturating the WiFi bandwidth or packet-per-second processing capabilities.

Do you have any logs that explain what is happening when the LIFX is disconnected?

Are you running any heavy services on the Asus like SMB or DLNA?

 

[sfx2000]

I'd say something like 255 might be the hard-limit. Regardless of the number of clients you could possibly overload the RT-N66U by saturating the WiFi bandwidth or packet-per-second processing capabilities.

NAT table size starts to become a problem many times before one runs out of addresses inside a netblock.

32 to 50 clients is not an unreasonable number for a BHR..

 

[Nullity]

NAT table size starts to become a problem many times before one runs out of addresses inside a netblock.

32 to 50 clients is not an unreasonable number for a BHR..

Yeah, but he specifically said he's not referring to TCP/UDP, just WiFi.


50 "normal" clients streaming Netflix, checking email, or simply idling will have a much smaller NAT footprint than just 1 client with thousands of BitTorrent peers.

 

[sfx2000]

RT-AC68U (or higher) should be able to handle 50 clients fairly easily for most traffic - 50 on WiFi is perhaps more than what one would want to have on a regular basis, but even there, the radios should be able to handle things - might be a bit slow over wifi with that many clients...

@Nullity does raise a good point - throw in a couple of popular torrents, and depending on client config, it could run the BHR out of memory sooner or later...

I've first hand experience with another vendor's BHR with over 65 wireless clients across two bands - it was able to deal with the traffic during the event (most of the clients were smartphones/tablets, which helps), but later that evening it was having issues with handing new associations, so I did reboot the BHR... anyways, that's an atypical load, and even there, the vendor said no more than 50...

If one needs more than 50, then one needs to look more at something like a uTik or similar - I've seen chatter that a SG-2440 running pfSense can take a full Class C netblock (e.g. a /24 in IPv4 space), and there, it runs out of address space before it runs out of compute/memory resources...