Are distributed Wi-Fi nets cheaper?

Two WLAN suppliers offer economic arguments

Industry analysis by expert Joanie Wexler, plus links to the day's wireless news headlines

Two wireless LAN suppliers this week have come out with economic arguments demonstrating cost benefits of a fully distributed forwarding Wi-Fi architecture.

Ruckus Wireless has broken down the pricing elements and compared the basic infrastructure costs of five vendors under hypothetical scenarios designed first for coverage and then for both coverage and minimum per-user capacity. Ruckus offers a WLAN controller in its architecture for management, but fully distributes the data forwarding function.

For it part, competitor Aerohive -- which doesn't use a controller at all in its "cooperative control" architecture -- offers similar cost comparisons but with a bit less detail in bottom-line dollars and cents.

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Two wireless LAN suppliers this week have come out with economic arguments demonstrating cost benefits of a fully distributed forwarding Wi-Fi architecture.

Ruckus Wireless has broken down the pricing elements and compared the basic infrastructure costs of five vendors under hypothetical scenarios designed first for coverage and then for both coverage and minimum per-user capacity. Ruckus offers a WLAN controller in its architecture for management, but fully distributes the data forwarding function.

For it part, competitor Aerohive -- which doesn't use a controller at all in its "cooperative control" architecture -- offers similar cost comparisons but with a bit less detail in bottom-line dollars and cents.

Bear in mind that these are vendors with a vested interest in proving that their setups scale more economically than their competitors'. Still, both offer some tasty food for thought.

Ruckus, in particular, shows just how quickly the cost of a WLAN can soar when you get to the point that you want to ensure some minimum capacity to each Wi-Fi user at all times. The reason is that the concurrent controller backplane capacity required cranks up the need for more controllers and associated licenses rather quickly.

Costs for networks in Ruckus's own sweet spot, about 1,000 users across a half million-square-foot area, ranged from about $130,000 (Ruckus) all the way up to about $515,000 (Meru Networks) when designing for capacity -- about a 75% difference. Other vendors included in the analysis: Aruba, Cisco and HP/Colubris.

Aerohive has built bar charts for some deployment scenarios that compare Aerohive costs with those of  "a controller-based architecture" without the dollar-figure breakdowns included by Ruckus. The Aerohive analysis doesn't specify how it arrived at its numbers, which show about a 51% capex benefit over centralized, fully redundant architectures, though the company told me that it used Cisco pricing as its base.

Aerohive shows that its sweet spot, price-wise, is when enterprises are distributed across more than one site.

To view these numbers-under-the-covers, check out these pricing analyses at the following links:

* Ruckus, "The Real Cost of 802.11n in the Enterprise"

* Aerohive, "Cooperative Control: Protocols Are Free"

Take the bottom-line dollar figures with a grain of salt, because actual costs vary according to the bells and whistles you need, whether or not they are included in the price, licensing structures and, of course, each vendor's discount plan.

Read more about wireless & mobile in Network World's Wireless & Mobile section.

Joanie Wexler is an independent networking technology writer/editor in Silicon Valley.