Looking for some advice on how to build out a proper network for a co-working office/venue space. I'm a university student looking into this on a voluntary basis, please excuse any ignorance.
Right now, they have 3 consumer router-APs (802.11g) chained off another consumer router that goes to the DSL line. One covers the management office area (15-20 users), one covers a corridor of small offices including a few small seminar rooms (5-60 users), and another covers an open, 3000 sq ft co-working space (50-150 users). No significant obstructions.
We have some regular users, but also a significant population of people who drop-in occasionally, or just for events and workshops. We would like to support all of them with wi-fi access.
Due to how the users are distributed, the bulk of them are in the large co-working space. During off-peak periods, there are < 50 users, but peak periods lead to 150+ users and everyone complains about the wi-fi – either can't connect, or after they're associated, have poor or no connectivity.
The way I see it, there are three separate problems:
- WAN link
- Routing/DHCP
- Wireless APs
They have just switched to a fibre line for the WAN link, so that is hopefully not the limiting factor for now.
Routing wise, we probably need something that isn't limited to issuing IPs off a fixed /24 subnet. We're also looking into doing some kind of traffic monitoring, tiered shaping based on different authed user groups/guests, as well as doing some analysis on x unique users / x repeat users / stay length as we have a lot of drop-in/guest users who come for events and workshops.
Are there any devices/solutions that we should look into for this?
At the wireless edge, we have a proposal floating around to just replace the 3 units in-place with Meraki MR34s – but I am concerned that one AP is just not going to cut it for 150 users. Our users tend to have at least 2 devices now, with some toting an additional tablet. Increasing the number of Meraki APs makes costs climb very fast with hardware + license..
We are looking at Ruckus and Ubiquiti as well, what do you think is likely to work out better? Or are there other solutions that we could explore as well?
I would like to use the cheaper UAP or UAP-PRO units and use the difference to increase the AP density – but then I am not sure what to use to implement the user auth/traffic shaping/analytics, to match the Meraki (FB Login, Presence, traffic shaping) offering.
