Limit amount of clients per AP?

[jsmith722]

Looking for solutions on how to limit the amount of clients that are allowed to connect to a singular Meraki MR36 without interfering with the SSID itself.

[alemabrahao]

In general, the recommendation is a maximum of 30 clients per radio. But it all depends on the type of traffic that you will pass through the APs. The more clients, the greater the traffic and the greater the channel utilization, which can make the user experience poor.

[alemabrahao]

Take a look at this https://revolutionwifi.blogspot.com/p/ssid-overhead-calculator.html

[Mloraditch]

There is no specific way to do that in Meraki that I'm aware of. If a specific AP was the only AP broadcasting the SSID you could blacklist clients and thus only allow the ones you want but that's going to be a manual thing to maintain.

Even with more advanced security, I've never seen a way to do this. For example ISE doesn't have a policy option where if X number of devices are already authenticated don't authenticate further devices to a specific network device.

What is your goal here?

[RaphaelL]

The goal is probably to mimic what almost every vendor supports : client assoc limit. https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/wireless/controller/9800/17-9/config-guide/b_wl_17_9_cg/m_clie...

[BlakeRichardson]

@RaphaelL I agree. It shouldn't be hard for Meraki to add this feature as you rightly said it's an association limit. 

Why it's not currently implemented doesn't make any sense as it's a great way of helping connected users get a decent connection and avoid overloading an AP with clients.  

[PhilipDAth]

I am assuming you have multiple APs, and this is an office environment.  Try creating a new RF profile using the "Open Office Profile".  This will lower the maximum power levels, and encourage clients to use a closer AP.

https://documentation.meraki.com/MR/Radio_Settings/RF_Profiles

If that has not done it you could try enabling (if it is not on already) the client load abalancing option.  Note that this can break some clients.

https://documentation.meraki.com/MR/Other_Topics/Client_Balancing

[sinelnyyk]

Hi @jsmith722,

As it was mentioned by folks above, there is no native solution in Meraki to limit the amount of clients per AP, so in this case it will be always the client decision to which AP to connect. With this in mind, key to the correct client distribution between APs is wireless design.

Here are a couple of KBs that can help you understand what settings can be used to control RF environment:

https://documentation.meraki.com/Architectures_and_Best_Practices/Cisco_Meraki_Best_Practice_Design/...

https://documentation.meraki.com/Architectures_and_Best_Practices/Meraki_Wireless_for_Enterprise_Bes...

If you have a high density deployment, make sure to conduct post-deployment site survey to validate the RF environment.