Need help to upgrade my office Wifi, up to 300+ devices.

[Ryan Lim]

Hi! I'm currently looking for ways to upgrade my router, and I'm a total newbie on this 
My office is currently under 800mbps internet speed. There's been an issue that if there's too many devices connect to the wifi, people will start having trouble to connect to the wifi.

I been looking into this myself, and from what I understand, does upgrading my router to Wifi 6 router help? (ASUS RT-AX3000)

 

I'm totally confused by these and would appreciate if there's any suggestion, because I don't really want to spend money on wifi 6 router and ended up not working .

Thank you!! 

[filpo]

16 minutes ago, Ryan Lim said:

Wifi 6 router help? (ASUS RT-AX3000)

yes it definitely will, but try and find something with a few more bands 

its also not too good on the 160mhz range 

[Angusticlavii]

Also could be a DHCP problem, when there are no IP-Adresses left in you home network to allocate them to new devices.

 

But Wifi6 is also a good idea to increase bandwith for that many devices.

[Skipple]

While WiFi 6 is the main upgrade for most with many more available device connections over WiFi 6, what you should be looking for is a wireless access point with WiFi 6E capabilities. WiFi 6E utilizes new and faster channels allowing for more and faster simultaneous connections. 

 

I'm going to be honest though, for an office of this size, if you are asking these questions, it may be wise to higher an outside contractor to handle this for you. There are security, liability, and reliability factors to consider. 

[LAwLz]

34 minutes ago, Skipple said:

I'm going to be honest though, for an office of this size, if you are asking these questions, it may be wise to higher an outside contractor to handle this for you. There are security, liability, and reliability factors to consider. 

This is what I was thinking too when I read this.

It sounds like OP is really strapped for cash but realistically, if you got that many devices and it's a business, you really don't want it set up by someone who doesn't know what they are doing (no offense OP). 

There could be several reasons why you are experiencing issues and without knowing what the network looks like, what security implications to look for, what the radio environment looks like, what the budget is, what the physical building looks like, and so on, it's impossible to tell what is or isn't a good suggestion or even the root cause of the poor experience you're having.

 

If you want to do this properly, you probably want a networking consultant to come in, have a look and then suggest something based on that. It sounds to me like you have a single consumer router in a completely flat network and then 300 devices connecting to it. That probably won't work well no matter which router you got.

 

If I had to guess, the issue is a really noisy radio environment, and switching to a different router won't really solve the core issue. It might alleviate it a bit but it will still be far from optimal. If everything is the same broadcast domain then that could also cause a lot of unnecessary overhead. I don't think just replacing the router will help you here.

[Ryan Lim]

2 hours ago, filpo said:

yes it definitely will, but try and find something with a few more bands 

its also not too good on the 160mhz range 

I see! Do i just look for 160 mhz above? 

[Ryan Lim]

2 hours ago, CaptainKieseI said:

Also could be a DHCP problem, when there are no IP-Adresses left in you home network to allocate them to new devices.

 

But Wifi6 is also a good idea to increase bandwith for that many devices.

That might be the case too, most of people here work with at least two device, a phone and a laptop. Would that be the problem?

[Ryan Lim]

1 hour ago, Skipple said:

While WiFi 6 is the main upgrade for most with many more available device connections over WiFi 6, what you should be looking for is a wireless access point with WiFi 6E capabilities. WiFi 6E utilizes new and faster channels allowing for more and faster simultaneous connections. 

 

I'm going to be honest though, for an office of this size, if you are asking these questions, it may be wise to higher an outside contractor to handle this for you. There are security, liability, and reliability factors to consider. 

I would do that if it's too much for me to handle! 

May i know what type of security are you talking about?

Almost all of us are doing sales and we solely using the wifi to access to google doc etc. 

[Ryan Lim]

1 hour ago, LAwLz said:

This is what I was thinking too when I read this.

It sounds like OP is really strapped for cash but realistically, if you got that many devices and it's a business, you really don't want it set up by someone who doesn't know what they are doing (no offense OP). 

There could be several reasons why you are experiencing issues and without knowing what the network looks like, what security implications to look for, what the radio environment looks like, what the budget is, what the physical building looks like, and so on, it's impossible to tell what is or isn't a good suggestion or even the root cause of the poor experience you're having.

 

If you want to do this properly, you probably want a networking consultant to come in, have a look and then suggest something based on that. It sounds to me like you have a single consumer router in a completely flat network and then 300 devices connecting to it. That probably won't work well no matter which router you got.

 

If I had to guess, the issue is a really noisy radio environment, and switching to a different router won't really solve the core issue. It might alleviate it a bit but it will still be far from optimal. If everything is the same broadcast domain then that could also cause a lot of unnecessary overhead. I don't think just replacing the router will help you here.

I see! If just replacing router wouldn't help me, is there anything i need to take note? I would probably hire a consultant for this but I really want to know basic for this in case I'm getting scammed. 

[filpo]

22 minutes ago, Ryan Lim said:

I see! Do i just look for 160 mhz above? 

No I mean the router isnt too good on the range of wifi band. But i assume your not gonna be using wifi

[Bdavis]

Commercial or prosumer grade hardware can easily handle that many clients. If you went with ubiquiti equipment it's super simple to set up, and their access points list how many simultaneous clients they can handle. The most basic setup would be the dream machine SE with one or more access points connected to it.

 

The reason you may want a pro, is you typically want to lock down your internet for security and liability reasons. I worked one place, and we could use the wifi. Then someone downloaded a bunch of pirated movies resulting in a cease and desist order and they no longer allowed personal devices on wifi.

 

Wifi 6 or 6E will handle more clients, but it is also dependent on mow many streams the access point supports. Ubiquiti's higher end access points support more streams and more clients.

 

I wouldn't spring for wifi 6E unless I had several client devices that supported it. You can buy two wifi 6 access points for the price of one 6E access point.

[Ryan Lim]

1 hour ago, Bdavis said:

Commercial or prosumer grade hardware can easily handle that many clients. If you went with ubiquiti equipment it's super simple to set up, and their access points list how many simultaneous clients they can handle. The most basic setup would be the dream machine SE with one or more access points connected to it.

 

The reason you may want a pro, is you typically want to lock down your internet for security and liability reasons. I worked one place, and we could use the wifi. Then someone downloaded a bunch of pirated movies resulting in a cease and desist order and they no longer allowed personal devices on wifi.

 

Wifi 6 or 6E will handle more clients, but it is also dependent on mow many streams the access point supports. Ubiquiti's higher end access points support more streams and more clients.

 

I wouldn't spring for wifi 6E unless I had several client devices that supported it. You can buy two wifi 6 access points for the price of one 6E access point.

I see! I checked and the price is indeed a little bit premium, but this does looks like the product I need! I will consult the set up details with the seller thanks for the reply

[LIGISTX]

I would look into UniFi as others stated. There is a lot of good info on it on YouTube.

 

300+ devices is a lot of devices, and again, as others said, that would imply there is a good group of folks using this network. It may be worth it paying an outside contractor to help set this up correctly, since downtime for a company costs a lot more then it would cost to get Wifi properly set up. 
 

If you do go about it yourself, you will need a subnet larger then the standard size. A /24 can only support up to 254 clients, this may be the issue you are running into - you are running out of IP’s. 
 

Use a /22 for example, this would allow 1022 IP’s on the subnet. You can also create multiple subnets, but that may be out of scope for what you need and more work then it’s worth.

 

If these words don’t mean anything to you, I would suggest google/YouTube, or hire someone to help, even if it’s just a consultation and remote assistance. Lawrence systems has fantastic YouTube videos, and they do network consulting, it may be worth your time to try and set up a call with them…