Vendors recommend avoiding single point of failure
Certain industries, such as healthcare, are mission-critical and are turning to Wi-Fi for much of their mobile caretaking needs. And there’s enterprise talk of going all-wireless, particularly in new, temporary and hard-to-cable sites. How does the reliability of Wi-Fi stack up against traditional wired Ethernet, given that user performance expectations are pretty high?
This issue is debatable. Some vendors argue that they offer zero packet loss and zero downtime with their Wi-Fi systems, end of story. No 9s to worry about.
Others offer servoice-level agreements that guarantee certain amounts of bandwidth to certain users and applications. And some argue that there are circumstances out of a WLAN maker’s control that relegate vendor guarantees of any amount of uptime little more than an overblown marketing ploy.
These are just a few of the arguments bandied about in an audio Webcast discussion called “Can you Really Emulate Ethernet Reliability With Wi-Fi?” Techie representatives from Aerohive Networks, Bluesocket and Motorola debated the issue and I moderated the conversation (full disclosure: I got paid by Webtorials to do so), which you can listen to by clicking here.
One point the Wi-Fi thought leaders seemed to agree on was that making Wi-Fi as reliable as Ethernet requires a multipronged approach that includes resilient architectures without a single point of failure and a bag of robust RF management tools. Resiliency of both your LAN and WAN might factor in depending on how your network is designed.
Mesh support, dynamic power adjustments and automatic channel changing are helpful at the local level for plugging coverage gaps if one AP should go offline, for example. For APs managed or controlled centrally across a WAN link by a WLAN controller, consider an automated (stateful/hot failover) backup cellular link or a completely diverse landline connection if the severing of that WAN connection will kill local Wi-Fi operation.
More tips are available here. And check back often: a new debate among different groups of vendors on different Wi-Fi topics will be posted here each week for the next five weeks.
