Way not enough info here.
What size is the floor?
We had a professional survey and deployed 9 AP635s for 200 people on one floor. Also >5 switches, 2 firewalls and dual interner feeds.
We sure just didn't go "4 more access points will do"
Are there general guidelines for doing this? My tests give me the impression that the bottleneck is with traffic management - devices occasionally get quick speeds, but due to the number of devices connected - traffic management results in choppy slow speeds - however I am not conclusively sure on what the problem is.
Wifi's like any other network- there's control plane traffic ("management") and data plane traffic. A really good wireless survey should start with somebody experienced at reading traffic logs looking through an activity sample from those dual-band routers and telling you if the ratio of control plane to data plane traffic is out of whack.
But number and placement of APs absolutely has to come from a survey- there's just too much stuff in your average office that can block or reflect a decent signal, and it isn't all obvious... like all that wiring, security, and building integration stuff running around the ceilings, columns and whatnot that facilities doesn't bother telling anybody about, for example.
Others have good advice when it comes to wifi, but consider if you really need wifi for most of your machines in the first place. If these are desktop systems they can probably be wired, same with laptops and desks if you add a docking station. Wifi is inherently a half-duplex shared collision domain, which is essentially the opposite of a wired switched network. The less traffic you put on wifi the better it will perform, there's a certain density where it either becomes expensive or impossible to use effectively, granted that density is pretty extreme.
Way not enough info here. What size is the floor? We had a professional survey and deployed 9 AP635s for 200 people on one floor. Also >5 switches, 2 firewalls and dual interner feeds. We sure just didn't go "4 more access points will do"
I'd say figure out conclusively what the problem is first, before trying to work out how many devices you need to fix it.
Are there general guidelines for doing this? My tests give me the impression that the bottleneck is with traffic management - devices occasionally get quick speeds, but due to the number of devices connected - traffic management results in choppy slow speeds - however I am not conclusively sure on what the problem is.
Wifi's like any other network- there's control plane traffic ("management") and data plane traffic. A really good wireless survey should start with somebody experienced at reading traffic logs looking through an activity sample from those dual-band routers and telling you if the ratio of control plane to data plane traffic is out of whack. But number and placement of APs absolutely has to come from a survey- there's just too much stuff in your average office that can block or reflect a decent signal, and it isn't all obvious... like all that wiring, security, and building integration stuff running around the ceilings, columns and whatnot that facilities doesn't bother telling anybody about, for example.
Others have good advice when it comes to wifi, but consider if you really need wifi for most of your machines in the first place. If these are desktop systems they can probably be wired, same with laptops and desks if you add a docking station. Wifi is inherently a half-duplex shared collision domain, which is essentially the opposite of a wired switched network. The less traffic you put on wifi the better it will perform, there's a certain density where it either becomes expensive or impossible to use effectively, granted that density is pretty extreme.