Learn about it and other hot topics at 2011 Wi-Fi Challenge site
Wi-Fi-enabled iPhones and iPads, Android phones and tablets, and BlackBerries and PlayBooks continue to pour onto the enterprise WLAN. As a result, high-density wireless usage is no longer only an issue in vertical markets like education, healthcare and hospitality.
High frequency, high-volume usage and the arrival of latency- and jitter-sensitive video and multimedia traffic on the WLAN mean that most enterprises cutting the Ethernet cord in their access networks now worry more about capacity than coverage. Getting greater capacity in Wi-Fi means designing increasingly smaller “cells” with more access points closer together. The more APs there are, the more times you can reuse spectrum for full-capacity coverage over and over again.
WI-FI SURGE: University, Aruba test iPad’s Wi-Fi video performance
That, of course, means additional investments in APs. But it also means that your channel plan must change and that enterprises need to take more measures to mitigate co-channel interference, in part by turning down the power of each AP to prevent them from shouting over one another. There’s a delicate balance to be struck among the number of APs, cost, coverage, power levels and RF tuning in order to make the network run, as Goldilocks might say, “just right.”
These are just some issues of building out a high-density Wi-Fi network to accommodate today’s traffic loads. If you want to learn more, tune into “High-Density Design Amid the Mobile Explosion,” one of three panel discussions at the just-launched 2011 Wi-Fi Challenge site. In addition to this session, moderated by yours truly and with participants from Cisco and HP, there are two other timely discussions you can listen to (or read a transcript of) at the site on WLAN access control (with Aruba and Enterasys) and how to maintain consistent Wi-Fi performance amid all this activity (with Fluke Networks/AirMagnet and Motorola).
Just as important is a handy downloadable text guide that discusses the Wi-Fi issues of the day and how the six vendors mentioned above differentiate themselves as they tackle them.
The site is a joint effort between Network World, Robin Layland of Layland Consulting and me, and I am compensated from the participating companies’ sponsorship fees for helping pull together all the content. I hope you learn a lot, and I welcome your feedback on the resources you find there.
