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Please feel free to correct me here but I thought the 25 connection limitation for an AP was a Cisco/Aironet best practice. I know I've personally seen that limit exceeded on many occasions with no ill effects.

From my measly 10 year experience being a WLAN engineer I always thought that connection limits were only limited by bandwidth and CPU power. I haven't seen any 802.11 standards that limit that.

I would recommend this solution, doesn't matter what make/model of AP you use.

1. High density deployment, very low power (1 mW), low gain omni(2 dbi or less) antennas. The key here is the low gain antennas. The lower the better. They are less sensisitve to co-channel interferrence.

2. Disable all datarates except 54 MBPS. What this does is allow a ton more management overhead that you cant get with lower datarates. The higher datarate allows the client and AP to spend less time on the air and less time on the air means more bandwidth and CPU power available. Since you have a dense deployment this should not affect the connection quality of your clients.

3. If you are using a wireless controller such as Aruba or Cisco, you can cap the bandwidth at say 1 MBPS per connection. This will basically cap your AP to only 54 clients, in theory anyways.

4. One last thing to consider. Security...this will be the deal breaker in my opinion. The tighter the security, the more AP CPU power it'll take to process the packets. Don't underestimate the amount of CPU power it takes to use AES vs TKIP. It is huge, especially on older wireless cards and APs. The difference between TKIP and AES can be a maximum connections allowed difference of 50% or so. If you can get away with TKIP, do so. Of course wide open would be best for performance all around but every fiber of my being cannot suggest that.

In my opinion, if you use the above logic you could come out with at least a 54 user per AP model, each sucking down 500k, providing you have a good survey done by a certified CWNA professional :)