Maximum Number of Connected Wireless Users?

Question

I was reading a wireless document that shows a design where 3 WAPs on a 802.11b/g network for 180 users.
Best practices talk about 15 to 20 users per Access Point, which is what we typically do anyway.
So, my question is can the Cisco 1230 or 1240 Access Points (as an example) support like 50 to 60 users per Access Point within range?
I understand that the WAP wireless network is a shared (like a hub) network thus bandwidth is shared among all connected wireless users.
So, understand those considerations, but I want to know if those Access Points can actually support that number of connected wireless users or if there is a maximum number of associated users?
Thank you!

Answer 1

The theoretical maximum is 2048. As part of 802.11, however, some number of
these 2k addresses are reserved bringing the IEEE maximum down to 2007.
Although the AP motherboard has memory capable of handling 2007 users, the
radio utilized in our 1200 Series AP has memory limitations which hold the
maximum number of client associations to 255.
The number of 255 is active associations, though the cam table can
contain 2048 entries because of the memory size, the number restricted
for actual active association is 255.This number is still far too large for sensible
networking but what is possible. Remember that WLAN is shared media, all users have to try
to get access to the media by waiting until it is free and then sending a request to
reserve the media for the duration of the frame size that they want to
send. If the air is busy then you have to wait a random time and start
again. So if you have too many users waiting they can end up waiting a
very long time - sort of traffic jam effect at a congested junction, one
more car and the traffic seems n times worse.I dont know as to how the number 255 was
arrived at but it is largely irrelevant as 255 is still too large to be practical for
active associations, we recommend 25-30 for most design work.