More than 32 clients

[raytaylor]

Hey everyone. I was doing some reading for future planning today.
At the moment we have a link from our base office to a high hill where we have the main access points which then link down to our clients.

http://i39.tinypic.com/aoqjiv.jpg

I was wondering, in this situation, I know we cant have more than 32 clients on an access point, but does that also apply to clients who would be below a bridge link? Would I be able to extend this to 200 clients around this hill and would the powerstation bridge still handle all those clients?

My reading today tells me that the 8 port hub and access points do their routing using mac addresses, rather than ip addresses so if thats the case, would the bridge link become unstable with so many clients having to be remembered by the hub and powerstations / access points above them?

My next situation is where we want to extend our coverage like this:
http://i39.tinypic.com/20gm9ht.jpg
Basically I am creating a tree. I am worried that the main links back up the tree would get overloaded - routing wise - not bandwidth wise - with having to remember the 100, 200, 300+ clients below it.
Would I have to employ some IP routers at some point or would I be able to simply keep creating a tree with AP's, AP's in client mode and 8 port hubs?

Reason I ask is we may be attaching units to every 4th streetlamp in a suburb and will have a main line of AP's back to back with cat5 going up the main trunk streets, and then more units spreading off from this main trunk. There is eventual potential for 800 clients if we had 1/3rd signup and I dont know if the links at the entry of the suburb going back up to the hill and to our base station would handle all these mac addresses - or have I got it wrong?

I know I will have to make the size of each tree smaller because of bandwidth limits but its the question of routing that I need to answer for now.

[WHT]

That 30 to 35 limit is for connected stations to the AP. If you had three APs connected to one backhaul link, you would have only three stations connected. So as far as the backhaul is concerned, there are only three stations, not the ninety or so stations on the network.

But then you'll still have to deal with the bandwidth loading which *does* propagate through the back haul.

[raytaylor]

That 30 to 35 limit is for connected stations to the AP. If you had three APs connected to one backhaul link, you would have only three stations connected. So as far as the backhaul is concerned, there are only three stations, not the ninety or so stations on the network.

But then you'll still have to deal with the bandwidth loading which *does* propagate through the back haul.

Thanks for clarifying that. I think I will set up maybe 3 backhaul links and run smaller trees of ap's and clients down in the suburb to keep the bandwidth high.