I've been tasked with improving the wireless network at my office / co-working space. I'm not particularly experienced with business network infrastructure, but I'm more experienced than probably all of the other people here and have volunteered to figure it out.
Our main issue is that our wifi network is lacking. Typically we have around 30 wifi devices in the office at a time, half of which are phones and half of which are laptops, but sometimes it can go as high as 60 - 80 devices. For example, we were a jam site for the last global game jam and had 40 laptops vying for wifi bandwidth, and some untold number of mobile devices.
Most of these laptops are running software like Dropbox or Google Drive, which sucks up a lot of bandwidth. Occasionally people may be streaming video and audio. We also regularly do video conference calls over wifi, and sometimes they don't perform well, which is the biggest thorn in people's sides.
We have the budget to get ourselves decent networking hardware, but I'm not sure what will fulfill our needs given the above. I'm planning on having our modem, router, switches, and wireless AP be separate devices since that generally seems to be recommend here.
Past that, I'm not sure how to move forward! In particular, I'm not sure how to choose a router, wireless AP / router, or both that will work for us. Other questions I'm looking for help on include but are not limited to:
Will QoS help us prioritize important traffic like video calls and web traffic over bandwidth suckers like Dropbox or BitTorrent? If so, should QoS happen at the router, the wireless AP, or both?
Do we actually want the wireless AP to be a separate piece of hardware from the router?
Could we get a consumer level wifi router and put it in bridge mode? Or is it better to get a business level access point?
Should we just hire someone else to handle this?
Any help will be greatly appreciated!