Meraki AP users count

[Matt_Wade]

Hey everyone this has been bugging me crazy. How can i know which Meraki AP is suitable for how many users ?

For example how can i know how much users is suitable for an MR 20 AP ?. any checklist or something will be usefull.

[UKDanJones]

This is a difficult question to answer…

• what clients (every client has different capabilities)
• what applications are they using?
• how many SSIDs do you have?
• what density?
• how many APs do you have (and therefore what channel widths are you using)?
• what neighbouring networks are there (and therefore what interference)?

in short… there isn’t a set number of clients per AP model… there may be a maximum number of associations per AP model but that won’t give you usable Wi-Fi depending on your network requirements.

start with requirements first and then design your WLAN to meet those requirements.

[Brash]

There's no hard and fast rule. It's all about airtime rather than client count.

There's technologies that theoretically maximize the amount of available airtime for clients (Eg. MIMO) but it may not always see real world benefits as much of it is clients based.

Finally, there's the amount of data a given client is trying to transmit and how frequently/infrequently they will be needing airtime to transmit/receive.

I've always really liked this video as a good explainer of some of the basic concepts and calculations: https://youtu.be/U31fQGCsmKk?si=rUHOU32H463jEEzj

All this boils down to, overspec or understand your requirements very clearly and engage a wireless professional.

Personally, for a typical office based working area, my rule of thumb is ~25 devices per AP.

[UKDanJones]

Unless lots of them are doing video calls then I’d go closer to 15 per AP

[UKDanJones]

Andrew is excellent - Peter has done a good presentation on the opposite… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U31fQGCsmKk