The major change we have seen in the last few years is that the main way people on any device access the network is wireless. We have mobile phones, tablets, laptops and all sorts of other devices using the WLAN and this means that RF design has changed from just making sure coverage is good to making sure the network performs well everywhere. This is a huge change in emphasis from ‘nice to have’ to ‘mission critical’. It’s simply not good enough anymore to throw up APs and hope the WLAN performs acceptably.This was emphasized for me in the first session at Wireless Field Day 5 with the Fluke Networks AirMagnet Product division presentation. They wanted to talk about the updates to the Survey Pro product they were working on to support 802.11ac, the upcoming Wi-Fi standard. For an excellent overview of the impact of 802.11ac I highly recommend Andrew vonNagy’s Revolution Wi-Fi blog series on 802.11ac Gigabit Wi-Fi. For this blog, I am going to concentrate on the updates to AirMagnet Survey Pro.First of all I will state that a large part of the driving force behind Gigabit Wi-Fi being marketed to consumers (almost too much hype) is the explosion in wireless devices that are being used. This has resulted in the consumerization of IT and major headaches for most IT departments in handing the load on their WLANs. It is still, however very early days with these devices as the standard is not yet ratified and there is a large amount of inconsistent performance in client devices being sold. Even just that the first phase client devices support 2×2:2 (that’s two transmit and receive antennas and 2 spatial streams) means those devices can potentially do 867Mbps over the air and this could saturate USB2 connections. So from the client side, USB3 is needed and I would say that the biggest gain will be when device manufacturers integrate 802.11ac into their products with PCI-Express cards.
via WiFiNovation | Scoop.it
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