enterprise WIFI for high density rooms

Hello,

I'm getting frustrated with my current wifi. Currently we have some hundreds of MikroTik hAP, wAP, cAP AC accesspoints running with several CCR in a controller forwarding based setup. The solution works ok, when there are only few clients connected with the access points, i.e. ~10 clients for each band. I say connected, i.e. there's actually not that much traffic <<50Mbit/s on the access point. The problem start, when more and more clients connect. Sometimes the traffic completely stops, also some clients do not get an IP address from the DHCP server which is running on the WiFi controller. It's not a STP issue either. On Mikrotik's forum you can find many topics about wireless problems, too. Mikrotik's support is non existing in our case. I was told that they are working on a new wireless driver package, no timeframe was mentioned. Yes, Mikrotik writes its own drivers, they don't take ready to use kernel modules from the chipset vendors. The hardware itself is current, e.g. the cAP AC has IPQ4018 ASIC (802.11ac Wave 2) PoE in and PoE out is great, but I have to admit their wireless driverhas a low quality and offers only basic features. They even don't promote their access points to support "up to XXX clients", but why did they release e.g. a Wave 2 Access Point which could do more, but lacks software support.

Ok, so here I am. I need access points for huge class rooms with 50 to 300 clients. Currently in those rooms I have 2 to 12 hAP/wAP access points (clear spectrum, 20 or 40 MHz channels on 5 GHz, non overlapping with all neighbour rooms.) I don't want controller based access points again. I will setup VRF instances and want Radius based dynamic VLANs with local tagged traffic for the clients on one single SSID. NAT would be done by an external firewall cluster, no more all inclusive box.

What is my budget, you will ask: Currently nothing, I'm planning.

So I was looking around, e.g. HPE/Aruba:

• Aruba 802.11ax AP-555: 600€
• Mounting, 60W PoE injector: 50€
• Aruba Airwave license: 30€
• Aruba Airwave Support contract + failover for 5 years, starting at 800€ (for 1 device license)

plus taxes. We get huge educational discount from HPE, but counting everything together I'm at ~500000€, that's without new PoE switches.

So, for one room with 50 clients, I'd take the best single access point and hope for the best. Still I don't know how it will actually work.

Of course, there are way less expensive solutions (Grandstream 4x4 802.11ac Wave 2, 100€, Engenius 4x4 802.11ax, 300€) with no licensing cost at all which would also work with my existing 802.3at switches, but I think none of them have ever been tested with a huge amount of clients connected and therefore will fail like the Mikrotik devices.