* Phasing in 802.11n
Now that Wi-Fi market share leader Cisco has turned up the volume on 802.11n, enterprises are likely to get more serious about planning for the high-speed wireless LAN.
Common thinking has been for enterprises to wait until the IEEE ratifies final 802.11n standards late next year to begin installing products. Products announced so far, by Cisco and others, function under the Draft 2.0 version of the emerging 802.11n standard and may not be 100% compatible with fully standards-based products in the future.
In the meantime, enterprises can prepare for migration by taking an audit of their environments to make sure both their wired and wireless infrastructures will be up to the task of supporting 802.11n throughput and power requirements when the time comes. This means beginning a migration to Gigabit Ethernet in wiring closet switches that support 802.11n APs with gigabit uplinks, for example.
The Farpoint Group, in a technical note issued earlier this year, goes so far as to encourage enterprises to get started with 802.11n, but advises a phased approach:
1) Start in the 5GHz band, which is far less cluttered than the 2.4GHz band used by 802.11g/b networks. Farpoint principal Craig Mathias suggests moving bandwidth-intensive power users and applications to this band to improve performance for all users in both bands.
2) Install dual-band, dual-radio 802.11n APs, and consider running an 802.11g radio as one of the modules initially to avoid disruption to the current environment.
3) Wait to deploy 802.11n in the 2.4GHz band to when all clients can be upgraded. Farpoint Group anticipates that operating both 802.11n and 802.11g clients in a single channel will deliver sub-optimal performance.
