1G WiFi Is On the Way – Is Your Network Ready?

A new spec for 1G wireless LANs is making its way through the standards process and companies would be wise to pay attention, as it will almost certainly factor into the way you think about both your wired and wireless network infrastructure.

The IEEE is working on 802.11ac, a standard for 1G bps WiFi networks. While the official standard isn’t expected to be complete until 2013, you can expect to see working products well before that. According to a blogger at Network Computing:

Popular predictions regarding 802.11ac have millions of devices in users’ hands by 2012 and billions by 2015. Expectations are that as the IEEE does its thing in slowly working on draft versions on the way to ratification of the final standard, the Wi-Fi Alliance in parallel will be much quicker in certifying interoperability of .11ac draft products than it was for .11n when it was in draft. This is the key to the predicted device explosion.

To find out what companies should be thinking about to prepare for 802.11ac, we talked with Chris Williams, a systems engineer and wireless networking expert at Carousel Industries, who offered the following five considerations.

If your wireless access points are handling 1G connections, then you’ll obviously need at least that much bandwidth where the APs connect to the wired network – and preferably lots more, Williams says. “You want to make sure the infrastructure is ready by having Gigabit switches,” he says. “If you only have a 1G link, and one user can saturate that, you’re completely maxed out.” Ideally you’ll want to trunk multiple 10G links together or, failing that, bundle multiple 1G links into a link aggregation group (LAG) to create a pool of bandwidth and to provide redundancy.

When 802.11n access points came on the scene, they required more power than the previous generation. While it’s too early to say for certain, Williams says it’s a reasonable bet that 802.11ac APs will require still more power. “The internals have to be beefed up to handle that type of speed,” he says. The original Power over Ethernet standard supplies 15.4 watts of power while the newer PoE+ spec calls for about 30w of power. “If you’re looking at replacing wired infrastructure, look at PoE+ at a minimum,” Williams says.

When replacing wireless APs, you may figure a straight one-to-one replacement is the best way to go. But Williams says 802.11ac APs will most likely have to be placed closer together to get maximum throughput and to ensure you don’t have coverage gaps – which just aren’t acceptable now that wireless is more of a must-have than a nice-to-have, Williams says. There’s a science to figuring out signal patterns and it’s best to have a certified engineer help with the configuration, he says.

If you’re considering a switch to a new wireless vendor, 802.11ac is certainly a consideration. “If you’re going to a new vendor, you want to focus on one that has a big investment in wireless. They will be one of the first to come out with 1G and will work out all the bugs,” Williams says. “That leads to a better product down the line, and better support and service, as opposed to a vendor that sells everything and may not be as heavily invested in wireless.”

It’s likely that 802.11ac APs will be available before compatible client interface cards are – or before you can justify buying them – but that shouldn’t stop you from implementing the 1G APs. “You have to be forward-thinking. Do you want to put in something that’ll soon be obsolete? You will eventually have the 1G clients,” Williams says. In the mean time, you’ll have a much faster WiFi network capable of supporting lots more wireless connections at whatever speed your current clients use. That’s never a bad thing.

For more information on how to prepare your network for the latest wireless technology, get in touch with Carousel.
http://www.carouselindustries.com/contact