WifiNigel

The WiFi industry has been buzzing with excitement around the recently ratified 802.11ac standard. The promise of higher speeds, lower battery usage for mobile devices and the enforced move to the higher-capacity 5GHz band is enough to put a smile on the face of even the most curmudgeonly members of the WiFi fraternity. I've been giving some serious thought recently to what the best approaches might be in terms of designing and deploying 802.11ac networks. There are obviously challenges as we move through the transition from legacy standards to the shiny new 802.11ac standard:  new cabling requirements for higher uplink speeds to 802.11ac APs Increased power requirements for our 802.11ac APs accommodating the mix of new and legacy clients figuring out exactly how we plan our channels for the brave new world of 802.11ac The 802.11ac standard mandates that access points and clients using the new standard will only be supported on the 5GHz band, which is great news

I was recently involved in some work for an organization that had a newly constructed building to expand their, already sizable, campus. The building was a new, state-of-the-art facility that would require ubiquitous WiFi network coverage for a range of devices, including wireless voice handsets. Like many organisations, they were faced with the challenge of specifying the wireless equipment that they would require long before the building had even started construction. In order to secure the funding they would need for the new wireless infrastructure components (i.e. APs, wireless controllers, licensing), they had to try to anticipate what the new wireless network would look like, taking account of the services that they would require. The organisation realised that they would require a few more access points than might be usually expected for basic data services over wireless, but had taken a best guess at how many APs they might require and where they might go. When we walk

Plans for new spectrum allocation for WiFi networks in North America are regular fodder for many blog and news articles that I  see scrolling past in the many RSS feeds that I monitor for WiFi related news. However, information about plans for additional spectrum allocation within the UK isn't quite so widely covered (in fact, I'd go so far as to say that it is largely ignored). But, here in the UK we still face the same issues as many other areas of the world: an explosion in mobile devices, massive deployment of WiFi networks in homes and businesses, and an ongoing increase in bandwidth demands. WiFi in the UK operates on both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands. We have 13 channels allocated for WiFi on 2.4GHz, but for practical purposes, only 3 may be used across a wireless LAN. On the 5GHz band, we have 19 channels allocated to WiFi, but are generally limited to using only 16 of those channels due to restrictions in supporting 3 channels that may interfere with weather rada