sharing wireless connection with 40+ people

if i was to get a router and share it with 40+ people would internet speeds slow down? any negatives to sharing with that many people? Are there any specific routers you guys suggest?

 

Whatever router you get, try to get something that can run a late model dd-wrt and has plenty of RAM. We use a Netgear WNR3500L at work with dd-wrt and it handles a couple dozen people just fine.

 

Thank you!!! so internet speeds won't slow down as long as we get the right router?

 

My current router states up to 32 connections. You still need to remember that with that many people you can easily overload your bandwidth to the point of an extreme slow down.

 

your internet will slow down drasticall depending on how many users are accessing at the same time and what they are doing.

for example if you have 20mbps down it will get divided up to each user if 3 or 4 are downloading torrents you will normally have an extremely slow connection for the rest.

I agree anything with DDWRT is the way to go and try to setup Qos and some sort of balancing per system so no individuals can eat up most or all of the connection

 

Since you're talking about 40+ people I assume your connection is very fast. (if it's not the whole thing is gonna be a nightmare)
In such a case DD-WRT might not be the way to go as it severely limits throughput which is not a problem if you have an ADSL2+ or similar type of connection but will be one for 50mbps+ connections. OpenWRT or Tomato would be better suited for the job. Whichever you choose in the end- you really need a router that can run a 3rd party firmware. With so many users you will have to make some tweaks and these tweaks and settings might not be available in stock firmware.

I agree about the RAM part- you need at least 64MB, in this case 128MB wouldn't be overdone wither.
On top of that something that handles throughput well- BCM4718 which runs WNR3500L and Linksys E3000 is the least you need.

Personally I'd go for Netgear NWDR3700 as a weapon if choice.
BTW I guess these people won't be crammed in one room- how big is the office/area you need to cover?

 

What does the OP really want to do? Host a lan party, cover a frat house, do a favor for the neighborhood, light up a coffee shop, what?

APs are pretty inexpensive these days. It might be better to use 3 or 4 APs and set them to different default channels (and with different SSIDs). Link the APs up to a master router switch that hosts a single DHCP instance and from that to the ISP modem.

A bit more up front work than running one AP, but the improvement in access and speeds would probably be worth the effort.

 

if all 40 people are using it at the same time, of course it would be slowed down. both the internet and the wireless channel are shared resources.

you can add wireless bandwidth as newsposter mentioned but you would still need to have multiple ISP link for internet.

 

okay so my school suggested not to buy a wireless router and instead just an access point. And through research i have found out that "You would buy an access point if you had an existing network and wanted to
add wireless capability". Does wireless access point have any negatives?

and what are the basic differences? answer in layman's terms please

 

from a layman perspective, they are the same. anything coined access point is usually more expensive and in general been able to handle more connections(faster CPU), have more features. A home oriented router for example is very difficult to have multiple devices to implement a roaming network, but AP usually has this feature.

 

Thank you! Exactly what i needed to know.