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So is 2007 the true breaking point of Wi-Fi? Medium contention aside what happens if you manage to connect that many clients to a single BSS? I know under current technologies thats not likely to happen due to available throughput, but with 802.11ac and other improvements down the pipe that wont be as much of an issue.

Sorry if I missed something obvious but these kinda questions pop into my head reading through the CWAP book.

Thanks,
Mike

You are right; if there is a technical limit to the number of associations, it is 2007.

However, most manufacturers have some other association limit for various reasons. For example, ours used to be 100 clients to one radio, but we were finding that in real life we could provide good service to more than that so we had to increase that number to 255.

And to your other comment, contention still exists with 802.11ac and even though it is faster than 11n, it won't magically fix Wi-Fi contention.

GT

Thanks for the additional info GT.

I didn't really mean to say medium contention would go away. Be curious to see how many clients vendors can reasonably support with greater available throughput, although it may be a moot point with hardware prices forever falling.

This is an interesting topic. I've always wondered if the number of clients vs. throughput increases linearly or exponentially? For example, 2 clients will theoretically take half the bandwidth. So does that mean 4 will be 1/4 and so forth or will it get to a point where x amount of clients will have less than 1/x bandwidth because of medium contention? This is assuming that all clients are greenfield to make things simpler.