Stabilizing performance as airwaves grow cluttered
Not so long ago, enterprise Wi-Fi users were the exception, not the rule. Early Wi-Fi office users accessed the network with laptops selected and configured by the enterprise. Accommodating occasional data users with well-understood, corporate-imaged, Wi-Fi-enabled notebook computers was pretty straightforward.
Now, wireless users are gaining the majority. And they use a wide mix of clients for network access. These include lots of consumer-grade phones and tablets that support inconsistent transmit power levels, receive sensitivity and other characteristics. This makes it challenging to build a Wi-Fi environment with any semblance of performance predictability, particularly as time-bound applications like voice and video ramp up over the airwaves.
What’s being done?
IN DEPTH: How to take your enterprise Wi-Fi network to the next level
At the most basic level, of course, Wi-Fi continues to get faster, at least for clients that are close to an AP. There are several three-spatial-stream 802.11n enterprise products on the market now with theoretical data connect rates of 450Mbps per radio. The latest are from Aerohive, which announced three new models today, two of which support three spatial streams.
Other three-stream suppliers include Aruba, HP and Meraki.
Meanwhile, RF management, automated site survey and spectrum analysis tools continue to grow more robust and mature. So one option — currently the most prevalent — is to throw bandwidth at the problem in the form of denser deployments of APs and rely on the latest tools to automatically make nuanced changes when appropriate. Such tools change channels, for example, to avoid interference. Others prevent legacy devices from degrading the speed of faster 802.11n devices.
Aerohive says it further addresses the client cacophony factor with its just-announced HiveAP 330 and 350 indoor APs and HiveAP 170 outdoor AP (a two-spatial-stream device). The APs have high-powered radios with discrete components that deliver a 5dB improvement in receive sensitivity, according to Stephen Philip, VP of corporate and product marketing.
That allows the APs to pick up the lower-power client transmissions, he says. He adds that running a high-powered radio and turning it down to run within FCC and other governments’ specifications results in less distortion and fewer errors.
Other Wi-Fi vendors that have tackled the looming performance issues in different ways, such as with single-channel virtual cell architectures, smart antennas and full wireless traffic engineering. More about them next time.
