Do you consider this high density?

[Roaming_24_7]

I have a open restaurant area that is around 20, 000 square feet. We are replacing our existing access points and am planning on installing the 3825i's. At peak usage we will get about 500 concurrent/active users doing light web browsing with small mix of streaming from you tube. The area is broken into two areas. The first is about 7000 square feet and the second is about 13000 square feet.
I had an initial concept of using small cells with every other B radio turned off. So about 4 access points in the smaller location and 6 or 7 access points in the larger location. I am being told that I will only need 2 or 3 AP's because of the AP client count capacity. This makes me think back to those days when your parents told you that just because it's possible doesn't mean you should do it.
Based o the area and the client count would you treat this as a high density installation? Do you think the 10-11 AP count sounds right....under the assumptions of a 50/50 mix between radios and an evenly distributed set of clients?

[Roaming_24_7]

Thank you. Great explanation of how you thought through the layout, capacity, and density. Thx again!

[Paul_Russo]

Hello Roaming 24/7 I posed your post to an internal resource and this was his reply The only thing that's not entirely clear is whether they have decent RF separation between the two spaces.  Lets assume that they do.  First we solve for 'capacity', then we determine if we need to address 'coverage' separately. So the larger area is 65% of the space, so we can assume it will have about 65% of the clients, so 325 clients in area 'A'.  If we say 20% YouTube/80% Web-Email then we know we can support ~ 128 clients per-AP (64 per-radio).   So 3 APs should provide enough capacity for Area 'A'.  Area 'A' is ~13,000 sq. feet of 'open space'.  So those 3 APs will easily provide coverage for the area. So we don't really even need to do the math to know that area 'B' will require 2 APs for capacity, and we also know that 2 APs will certainly suffice for coverage. I'd go with 6 APs, 4 in area 'A' and 2 in area 'B'.  *Probably* just turn off 1 2.4GHz radio in area 'A', and probably be able to use 40MHz wide channels on the 5GHz radios Hope that helps

[Christoph]

The total number of stations supported by one AP is not the real limitation but the number of stations sharing the airtime of one channel. It's difficult to approx the number of APs without an overview of the location. To bulid a few smaller cells is a good idea. However, probably your Internet connection will be the smaller bottleneck.

Maybe you can start with some APs and if you recognize that your WLAN is congested you can add more ones.