Router Recommendation for Hotel

[brian_bingham_5]

I am installing 65 AP's with a ZD3050. I work for an ISP and we are giving a 50meg fiber connection to the site for Bandwidth. This is a 9 story Hotel and will have quite a few users connecting at one time. What router would you recommended for this setup. ZD is currently issuing DHCP so this would be used to handoff the internet connection.

[bill_burns_6069]

I would think that as an ISP, this is something you'd have a lot of experience with.
Especially if this is something you're going to have to support, you'll want to deploy similar hardware to what you have at other customer sites. (Maybe there's an in-house resource you can ask?)

Here's a link to advice from a few other users:
https://forums.ruckuswireless.com/ruc...

[ray_eads]

I have been using routerboards for a number of years. There are lots of variables of course, but this one is nice: http://routerboard.com/CCR1036-12G-4S

[kosek_dan]

Take a used small form factor PC that has at least a 2.4Ghz Core Duo processor, 2GB of ram and two Gigabit Ethernet LAN ports and install PFSense. You won't be sorry! Simply, quick, inexpensive and manageable.

Plenty of performance and the ability to turn on VPN (OpenVPN) access to you can remotely manage your customer's needs. Try using the Viscosity VPN client ... Mac or PC, you will love it!

(Don't forget to contribute to the project!)

BTW ... I have heard good things about the routerboard product Ray mentioned above, but you do have to learn a little, either way you go.

[drc]

Can't go wrong with Cisco. Some routers I've used on hotels:

Cisco 7206VXR w/ a G1
(55 buildings, 2 floors each, about 25 rooms per floor, using about ~250Mbps). Note: At 50% cpu utilization on this router funky things start happening...CEF-related, usually.

Cisco ISR1921
two hotels at the same time (A: 21 floors, 640 rooms, 54 APs, two ZDs, on 30mbit, B: 12 floors, 472 rooms, 67 APs, one ZD, using usually ~80Mbps).
Note: transmit discard problems every so often, so I'll be peeling off one hotel to its own ISR soon.

Cisco ISA570
(2 floors, 50 rooms, 12 APs, one ZD, on 15mbit using ~30Mbps)
Note: Dead simple to configure via https, reminiscent of CCP, just no IOS.

pfsense as a VM on esxi 5.1
(tower a 14 floors, 342, tower b, 8 floors, 220 rms, tower c 5 flrs, 120rms, using ~60Mbps)
Note: I wanted to see if I can roll something else. pfsense had a vm downloadable. So I tried this on an esxi host that's running two other VMs (openvpn server and a centos/freeradius captive portal test thingiee). It was okay, but we were concerned with transmit discards. So I installed pfsense as a standalone on a Dell server. It was okay then, but by then my network vp got turned off by it (he's an open source practitioner even), so abandoned to a Cisco ISR 3945, which was ok, since we added more load (IPTV using Enseo boxes and Cisco VOIP+a lot of VG224s).

Most are DHCP/NAT/Routing only, with the exception of the 7206VXR lodging router, which does have an external DHCPD and about 30% of users have public IPs (thus not NAT'd).

Hope this helps.