Wifi for a 1000 users

This is business, right? For commercial use, get commercial equipment and a commercial installer. You'll get proper commercial support.

Don't do it yourself ... unless you want to permanently own the maintenance work.

I get your point. I really do.
But based on experience, these things never fail on a Monday morning and I don't think I've ever been able to reach any kind of customer service when I actually needed it...
I find it best to know as much as possible about the installed hardware to be able to fix it myself. Plus, my boss really likes it when I know stuff...
We are only open in the summer during the short Swedish vacation period, when the IT-companies goes on vacation.

So I think I fall under the "unless you want to permanently own the maintenance work"- category in this case.
I would very much like to be the guy who makes this work for cheep and the guy who can keep it running.

After talking to several different support, sales and tech people at different companies, my conclusion is that the support part of it is the only thing that differs consumer grade from commercial. And the support isn't worth that much to me.

However.
I've never done it before and based on the low activity in this thread, it seems not many people have.
I found tutorials on how to setup a 1000 user DHCP-server, but I'm not quite clear on what hardware I would need to get...
I'm mostly concerned about the stability.

Hiatus

PS. I've been on the phone with the company that sold and installed the current setup. They kind of admitted that they sold us the equipment thinking we could use the Zone Director as DCHP-server. They may end up getting us a proper router. As they should have done in the first place. I pointed out that I didn't feel like we got what we paid for and what was promised and the last call of the day came from their supplier asking about our specific needs.

So it may end up cheeper than I could have hoped for. They do not provide any support, only installation, so I'll still need to learn how to manage it, though.
But nothing is settled yet, so I may end up MacGyver-ing this thing after all...

Routers are like PC to run a 1000 users you need some power behind that not a home router which can only manage 20 users most routers state maximum users it can handle. You are missing some serious points what if users download illegal software, porn, images what if someone hacks the system and infects 1000 users stealing their bank details. The legal implications are tremendous. Normally things like this run via a proxy server that block illegal activity and records what everyone does

Fair point.
But the Zone Director takes care of some of that stuff. At least the legal part of it...
Our guest needs a user account to access the wifi and they have to agree to some really lawyery stuff to get on there.

I know that we need a hardware firewall of some kind.
We used to use a Sisco ASA 5505 as firewall which worked well with what our old router could provide in terms of speed and number of users...
The new wifi installation was supposed to be an upgrade to the firewall as well, but once again, the Ruckus doesn't seem to be the do all be all appliance that they sold us...

I know most consumer grade routers won't do the job.
The Ruckus does 500 IP's i found out, so even if it could do the job, it wouldn't be enough...

Hiatus

The amout of ip it can issue doesnt mean all those can run at once and with a1000 ip they will have to run on at least 4 seperate subnets which can cause problems if they are trying to connect to things on a specific subnet is you have ip 192.168.1.1 the highest on that is 192.168.1.254 then you have to move onto another subnet.

You say Our guest needs a user account to access the wifi and they have to agree to some really lawyery stuff to get on there

What is going to verify the account?

Update time.
We will be getting the previously quoted $1000 firewall/router for free from the ones who were supposed to supply us with everything we needed in the first place. It pays to be a pain in the ass. That bothers me a bit. You should get the same service if you are a timid guy too...

This means that I don't have to worry about this anymore. It will be delivered pre-setup, so just for me to plug in and hope for the best. Next part is figuring out how to get maximum speed out to the AP's... I'm loosing somewhere around 70% along the way. Maybe the new router will fix it. Probably not.
The technician who's doing the setup said we only needed one subnet for the 1000 users. He said something like 255000 IP-addresses could be handled in one subnet by this router. I asked specifically about that since you pointed it out...

But just for my own interest.
What do you mean by verifying the accounts? Verify what?

As I wrote earlier, the Wifi-controller takes care of the accounts and logins. Our guests have to identify them selves on check-in and gets a personal 8-digit alphanumeric code that can only be used for one device during a limited time (often lasting the entire stay). No code-sharing. Codes can only be used once.
The user agreement states that when using our network, the user is responsible for their own actions online and that we can kick any user off the network for any reason at any time. Plus lots of more words and legal paragraphs.

In our previous setup, I had most ports blocked in the firewall except for those that we use for our own equipment, mostly to save bandwidth if someone got the idea to setup a torrent server in the camper...
Not sure how we are going to manage this going forward, though.

Hiatus

Well, to sum this up, we all got what we wanted in the end. Kind of...

The companies that were involved in selecting our hardware in the first place shared the cost for the missing piece.
We got a Clavister E80 Firewall delivered last night and it was supposed to be pre configured and Plug & Play. Not so much, it turned out...

In the end I had to configure some of it myself t get it online, but the subnet was configured already.
Seems to be working fine so far. Most of the 1000mbit gets lost in the wifi, but when I'm wired up directly to the firewall, I get around 850mbit up and about 470 down. Nothing is lost between the switches, so the wifi is the problem...
I think we need to get some repeaters up on the roof tops of our cabins to get better coverage.

But the 1000 user wifi issue is solved, at least.

Hiatus