Are there any tests I can run on a network to simulate 100 heavy network users?

I will be hosting a Ruby on Rails workshop at a small hotel in the near future, and while they have 'Wifi' everywhere on the property, and the property normally hosts 150 - 300 people, I am not 100% confident that they have hosted 150 tech people that tend to have heavy web surfing habits/needs.

Their tech department is also 1 or 2 guys.

Are there any automated tests I can download and run from my laptop, on the network, that would simulate 100 'heavy users' on the network at the same time?

Their broadband pipe is a 15mbps cable connection. Would that suffice for the general surfing needs of 100 - 150 techies? I know all it takes is 1 or 2 bit torrenters to kill the entire network, but assuming we can at the very least block those ports or encourage the attendees not to file share on the network, would that speed suffice for general surfing needs?

What are good resources online that would allow me to quickly get up to speed on the IT related issues, so that I can ask their sysadmins the right questions?

Edit: Note that I am fairly technical, so assume I can get up to speed quickly even with technical manuals, etc.

Simulating users is very hard. There are various sorts of load generators, but in the end you have to make assumptions about how your users use the network, and what service level you want to give them. Without this you are pretty lost. There is a huge difference between 150 users checking mail, and 150 users on netflix. This is one of those things that are so much work to simulate that it's not worth it.

With that said...

Typical over-subscription rates for an ISP here are in the range 3-20x. That means that if you have an uplink of 15 mbit you would subscribe 45-300 mbit, or in your case each user would get 0.3-2 mbit each. Enough for basic surfing and e-mail, but don't expect it to go fast by any measurement. Considering that your users are probably in the high load category you are likely to end up at the lower number.

I would worry a lot more about the basic infrastructure. Can the DHCP even hand out 150 addresses (many hotels only hand out 64 or 128), will their authorization/accounting server barf and what do you do when it happens?

You can try to block bittorrent, but it's mostly a pointless exercise unless you do DPI. The users will find a way around the block, or in a worst case run VPN. It's much better to do some basic traffic shaping and give each user a fair share of the bandwidth. It's also easier to implement.

Have you seen this question? A couple of the answers provide some excellent information.

What are the obstacles to providing reliable Internet access and Wi-Fi at large tech conferences?