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Ruckus AP capacity planning/formula

samuel_eng
New Contributor III
Ok,

CLIENTS: Single stream, 802.11ac

Connected to 5Ghz (only) and 20 channel width with theoretical and optimal RF conditions

AP: Single R500

How many concurrent clients can I serve with for example a Netflix 5mbps stream?

What is the formula / model?
Thanks
36 REPLIES 36

david_henderson
Contributor II
We just did some testing of a Ruckus R700 AP. We had 1080p video sitting on an internal server and used new MacBook Pros to connect. These laptops all had 802.11ac nics. We streamed this video to one client and then kept adding clients until we saw pausing or stuttering in the video. This was all using 20Mhz channel width and only 5GHz. Seven clients worked fine, as soon as we added the 8th video stream we got stuttering. Keep in mind that 1080p video is using more bandwidth than youtube videos unless they are HD and full screen If we used both bands I am guessing we could double the number of streams

Wow.

7 Macbook Pros w/ 802.11ac WiFi cards streaming 1080p video from an onsite server (so internet bandwidth/congestion wasn't factored in) through the 5Gig radio of an R700 w/ the channelization set to 20Mhz.

Not just a real world data point, but one that correlates very closely w/ the OP's use-case.

Please replicate on 2.4Ghz and see what happens and r710 has no airtime fairness.

Unfortunately I do not have all the test gear any longer. We borrowed test gear from Aruba and Ruckus and did some extensive internal testing before deciding to go with Ruckus. All the test gear was returned. This summer we will be deploying 400 R710 APs. I hope that airtime fairness is working by then

john_d
Valued Contributor II
1080p video is generally defined to be around 8-10mbit bitrate... Getting ~56mbit of video throughput across 7 clients on a 20MHz channel seems like it's not too far fetched. My office uses, let's say, a Ruckus competitor's AP's that they prematurely locked to 20MHz because "high density" and I can barely pull 80mbit from it using a 1 client : 1 AP test.

If it's possible to get more than 7 clients to stream 1080p from a single AP at 20MHz, I'd be highly impressed. But at any rate, this is one of the reasons I was saying earlier that it's probably a mistake to prematurely decide to use 20MHz channels unless it's an extremely dense setup with 12+ overlapping AP's at a given point.