I am looking after a wireless network (not voluntarily I might add) That is currently being used as a file server (films and movies [there are no copyright laws here before we go into the leaglity of this lol]).

Hopefully we are meant to be getting a broadband link, thus enabling the network users to have wireless internet access too. Now here comes my question.

Will the one router I have (Linksys WRT54GS) be sufficient for 20+ users to surf the net and download these files? If not, is it possible to bang in another wireless router and configure that as the wirelss broadband gateway?

Please help as I am getting grief from the hierachy

As long as they are all in range of the wireless it should be enough for the 20 users.

An 802.11g wireless access point has a maximum connection speed of 56mb/sec but thats shared amongst all the wireless users. If your users are some distance away the speed will also drop , so it's not uncommon for you to only have about 20mb/sec available for sharing.

Your broadband connection will probably be only 2 or 4mb per sec so the 20mb is more than enough for people to share the net access without being limited by the wireless , but once you start adding in lots of downloads from your fileserver you will start to get massive slowdown.

There are two ways to minimise this.

Firstly , keep as many of the users as possible on a wired connection.

Secondly , consider having a couple of wireless access points running on your network using different channels at either end of the building. Then half your users can use one and half the other. It gives you double the bandwidth for not much extra cost

Just doing a quick lookup on interweb

the Linksys WRT54GS router has the speedbooster function, that means that as long as the wireless cards support it then a theoretical max speed of 110mbps is possible over short distances.

You wont be able to use an adsl based (BT for example) isp with this router, as its broadband port is a 10/100 lan connection. So you would need to use ntl/telewest for example.

You wont be able to use an adsl based (BT for example) isp with this router, as its broadband port is a 10/100 lan connection. So you would need to use ntl/telewest for example.

I guess if you are using an ADSL provider, you could just get a basic ADSL router/modem combo, and connect it to the wirelss router using one of its switch ports and not the broadband port.

I would also suggest doing what Dr zoidberg said, that is getting another access point to spread the load a bit. At my work here, an access point can quite happily cope with normal Internet usage, but as soon as we have 20+ users trying to access large files or videos over the network, it slows right down to a crawl.

Cheers for responses especially yours many I didn't even realise it was not a modem router. I never bought the kit a guy who is a computer gnu did

As I am a wireless biff. How would I configure the wireless access point to work?? I am only au fait with wired networking so wireless is a whole new world!!!