* Enterprise-class Draft N products: Do you need them yet?
It’s all well and good that some enterprise-class products complying with the current draft of the emerging IEEE 802.11n wireless LAN standard are poised to hit the market. Meru Networks announced last week, for example, that it intends to ship access points and controllers this summer that comply with Draft 802.11n.
Meanwhile, Colubris Networks, an enterprise-class Wi-Fi vendor, plans to announce a Draft-N access point next week that it says will work with its existing controller.
It’s nice to know that these products will be waiting in the wings when you need the throughput and coverage benefits of 802.11n. But I suspect many companies won’t rush to deploy them.
Some considerations:
* If you are not experiencing any bottlenecks with your current Wi-Fi network, is there any reason to believe that your wireless traffic loads will suddenly jump to require the 100Mbps to 300Mbps speeds supported by these new networks? Many enterprises haven’t yet accumulated the volume of Wi-Fi application traffic that would require the extra speeds of 802.11n and thus merit the added investment.
* If you don’t need 802.11n’s extra bandwidth today, you might want to keep 802.11n in mind but begin replacing any 10/100Mbps LAN access switches supporting wireless access points with gigabit-speed Ethernet devices as the switches become due for upgrades or replacement anyway. The final 802.11n standard isn’t expected until fall 2008. So if you take your time getting to 802.11n, by the time you install 11n products, they might already be compliant with the final standard.
* On the other hand, if you think you might indeed need the 100Mbps+ bandwidth now, do a cost-benefits analysis. Depending on number of users, their degree of mobility, your mix of Wi-Fi supported applications and your productivity expectations, it might be worth biting the bullet, making the investment now, and getting an extra 12 to 18 months of benefit from the nascent technology. If you can demonstrate that the return of deploying now will be higher than what you must spend for initially high-priced products, which you may need to software-upgrade later, that’s where the rubber meets the road.
