Another router question

[CAMRAMan]

Two of the AWL Jrs go to a primary school that has been given a grant to buy ten more laptops. All well and good. However, where they will be used has limited wireless Internet, provided by a couple of ancient-looking, domestic D-Link routers. I suspect they would struggle to handle sixteen laptops at the same time. The school already had six.

They had someone in to survey the school. They were clearly piss takers and quoted ten grand. I suspect they could get away with one decent router with three omni-directional antennae. It's a Victorian school building with thickish walls, but I still think it would be enough. It only has to cover a couple of classrooms.

So, any router recommendations for the task? The budget is what it takes, but I was hoping £500 might be enough for the kit.

[Feanor]

A couple of Wireless Access Points, one per classroom, wired back to a central router which won't do wireless.

It's possible the existing set-up is exactly that: a couple of cheap wireless routers configured as WAPs only.

[CAMRAMan]

Forgive my ignorance, but can two crappy routers handle the bandwidth of 16 laptops all surfing simultaneously?

[Feanor]

It depends what they are doing.

But wireless is not a great method for connecting a large number of devices.
Remember, the 54Mb/S offered by say 802.11g is *shared* between *all* the devices, no matter how fancy the access point.
That's going to be the bottle-neck, I expect.

That's why I suggested having 1 WAP per classroom, to reduce the number of clients per WAP.

What's the underlying Internt connection in use?

A professional installation that works properly will cost money.   What exactly did they quote for?

[pcolbeck]

And as soon as you stick in a load of APs they start fighting with each other and are a pain to configure for non overlapping frequencies so you  end up using a light weight access points and a wireless LAN controller. 10K would be a reasonable cost for that kind of setup. The access points themselves will cost £200 or more each a WLC from about £1500 then  you have wiring and installation costs.

[CAMRAMan]

Well,yes. The issue is that they are happy with wired access, but need wireless for these two rooms at the far end of a corridor.

They won't be doing anything other than surfing. No major, heavy duty downloading, so not too heavy individually on bandwidth.

The 10k quote was for the whole school and was not for what they requested and, I hope, specified.