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A bit overkill?
- Thread starter djrooni
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It depends on where you are providing coverage. Some buildings cause lots of passive interference. More APs does not alway equal better performance. In many cases, people overdeploy APs and it simply creates more interference and degraded performance.
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Very much overkill. All of your Access Points are connecting wirelessly to the router (the dotted line connections in the screenshot indicate this). This means, much of the WiFi capacity is being split between client and uplink tasks.
If you have a large facility you are trying to cover, the number of Access Points may be ok, but if you could connect them via Ethernet to the router, you would have better performance. That would allow up to 1Gbps uplinks from Extremes and Time Capsules to the router, 100Mbps for Expresses. If direct Ethernet is not possible, powerline or MOCA adapters can get Ethernet to remote locations, generally in the 300Mbps - 1Gbps range.
In addition to performance hits from the sharing of WiFi radios (client + uplink), you may have a lot of interference from radios operating on the same channels as belvdr suggests, they tend to interfere with each other and slow things down considerably.
When it comes to WiFi, less is almost always better. Commercial grade gear is designed to deal with the contention of high concentrations of WiFi access points, but Airports don't play in that arena.
A little more detail on the reasons for so many Airports, the challenges you are trying to overcome, and current performance results might help get some constructive guidance.
If you have a large facility you are trying to cover, the number of Access Points may be ok, but if you could connect them via Ethernet to the router, you would have better performance. That would allow up to 1Gbps uplinks from Extremes and Time Capsules to the router, 100Mbps for Expresses. If direct Ethernet is not possible, powerline or MOCA adapters can get Ethernet to remote locations, generally in the 300Mbps - 1Gbps range.
In addition to performance hits from the sharing of WiFi radios (client + uplink), you may have a lot of interference from radios operating on the same channels as belvdr suggests, they tend to interfere with each other and slow things down considerably.
When it comes to WiFi, less is almost always better. Commercial grade gear is designed to deal with the contention of high concentrations of WiFi access points, but Airports don't play in that arena.
A little more detail on the reasons for so many Airports, the challenges you are trying to overcome, and current performance results might help get some constructive guidance.
forums 
The chatter from all of them, and the likely interference on channels has got to have a noticeable effect on bandwidth. Wow. Trowing in a few switches should help, but using wire for connections between AP's is the way to go.
https://www.metageek.com/products/inssider/
Jesus, get a Netgear Orbi.
With an old airport system set up like you have - with each satellite you're diminishing the speed of the signal.
So it's not even overkill, it's just stupid.
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Exactly. Using Apple airport gear like this is idiotic.
Wireless as noted by the dotted line. It doesn’t really matter though as this is poor design.