small office on wifi

[droplet]

our office has two (netgear dgn 1000 and netgear dgn 2200). each router is on its own 6Mb line.

we currently have two desktops that are connected to the one router by cable, and up to fourteen laptops that connect to the two routers via wifi. there are several (up to 16) smartphones that also connect to the wifi.

we have several graphic designers who browse images extensively, and some journalists who also browse extensively (including video) in their research, as well as the general office staff using email (with large attachments frequently).

there is obviously also a slow internet experience in general (12Mb shared between many people, most of them heavy users). we frequently experience a user losing connection with the router to which they are connected.

QUESTIONS:

1. is this a function of the wifi being overloaded?
2. do we need to connect all the laptops with cable?
3. how many users can reasonably be expected to be able to connect via wifi to a router?

thanks

 

[Pada]

The recommended option would be to install a router that can do load balancing for you for the 2x ADSL lines, unless you actually want to split the bandwidth via the 2 separate WiFi AP's.

If stability is important, then I would recommend going the cable route. Like at our office we're also experiencing WiFi disconnects/malfunction with our expensive Cisco AP's, just due to the vast amount of people connected to it.

For a start, I would recommend that you manually set the WiFi channels of the 2x WiFi AP's so that you're sure that their frequencies aren't overlapping. Like use channel 1 on the first AP and channel 6 on the second AP.
See http://superuser.com/questions/143578/how-do-i-get-a-300mbps-connection-over-802-11n for more details on how 300Mbps 802.11n's channel bonding works.