What is the maximum number of concurrent wireless clients a D-Link WBR-1310 will support?

How many concurrent wireless clients will a D-Link WBR-1310 support? What about a comparably priced Linksys router?

Solution 1:

First and the highest limit is the range of addresses the subnet has. Most home routers are limited to a class C address which gives 254 addresses, one of which is used by the router itself, which gives 253 clients. However you are far more likely to run into limits based on either the amount of bandwidth available or the devices NAT table. The bandwidth limit could be your broadband connection, or the wireless bandwidth if lots of your clients are wireless. Remember the 54mbs quoted for 802.11g is half duplex and shared by ALL clients on that access point. You have 10 clients all using it at the same time and you are down to a MAX THEORETICAL bandwidth of 5mbs half duplex. Probably closer to 3 in real life, and that isn't taking into account the impact of all those collisions is going to be having.
The NAT table in the router doesn't care about how many clients you have connected, it does care about how many open connections you have. 1 torrent running will normally fill or nearly fill a domestic routers NAT table. If you look on Small Net Builder they have router charts, one of the things they test is how connections the thing can handle, I suggest you take a look.

So, the short answer is that the router will flawlessly handle 250 devices, so long as none of them is doing anything. The busier the clients get, the less it can handle.