I'm helping one of our remote training offices who is sharing space with a customer and has been denied access to the customer's wifi network in the building and we don't have company network for them to use. The training team did get company approval for an ISP subscription and to purchase a wifi router. They purchased and installed the Nighthawk R9000 and it works fine except for when the entire training team is in the office (>20) and connected via VPN to the corporate network. The VPN drops out intermittently throughout the day for various users at various times. My research showed that the router has a maximum of 32 devices per band and I suspect it's the number of user connecting, the traffic load on the router (WebEx meetings, training videos, etc.), and potential interference in the building.
My ask is : would adding one or two AP devices to the office work to ease the load on the R9000 and improve reliability under heavy loads?
Yes, depending on what goes on with connected devices and connections, it's easy to max out any routers max connections. Just one device can have hundreds of different connections going on at the same time. Multiply this by how many actual devices you have connected, specially on wifi, then the load gets up there.
Any chance some of these can be put on wired LAN connections? Would help as well.
Find out what channels interferences are being used. Set for manual channels, 1 6 or 11 on 2.4Ghz and any on 5Ghz thats not being used. Changing to manual will help maybe.
Set WPA2 and AES only and test.
Set UpToSpeeds at 300Mb and test.
If all this still has problems, then another wireless AP maybe needed.
My Setup (Cable 900Mbps/50Mbps)>CM1100>Orbi RBK50 and Orbi RBK852 Additional NG HW: C7800/CM1100/CM1200, Orbi CBK40, Orbi RBK852, R7800, R7960P, EX7500/EX7700, XR450 and WNHDE111
Thanks for your reply. Here is what I'm having them try:
Set up WPA2 security (if they don't have it) to keep freeloaders from nearby offices from jumping on the network with their cell phone, tablets, etc.
Set up MAC filtering for the company-issued laptops to control people in the office from jumping on the network with their cell phones, tablets, etc.
Step 1 gives them control outside the office. Step2 gives them control inside the office. If they still experience drops in the VPN when the office is full, I will have them move on to adding AP devices to help support the load.
Not ruling out channel interference as a possible cause as well.
