Hi all,
what is in your opinion the maximum sustainable number of clients (SM) on a Canopy bridged network?
I mean: many AP, no VLAN, no routing, unique gateway… just old plain layer 2, imaging that every SM is natted on customer side (on the SM or via an external router).
we had a bridged network upto about 400 customers, with all customers having a router, but even then we were having problems with brodcast storms around once a week or more with some people messing with their routers and sending dhcp across the network which causes a major headache. it eventually came to be too much of a headache and we switched to a routed network. since then it has saved a lot of time troubleshooting. definitely worth it.
id say an absolute maximum of 1000. but in reality youd want to change long before that number
It really depends on your customers and their traffic. You could have 5000 customers connected in a flat layer 2 configuration and not have any problems if they aren’t doing anything nasty or moving much data. NATting in the SM will help a lot, but at larger numbers normal traffic like ARP requests can become an issue. That’s ignoring problems like loops, equipment faults, and customers finding ways to do bad things anyway (like a ping scan/port scan of the subnet that their radio lives on and gradually discovering your whole network)
Best practice is to make the Layer 2 broadcast domains as small as feasible/practical. Most common is one tower as one “logical unit” - be it a unique VLAN back to your core or a router being on site.