Forum

http://www.arubanetworks.com/pdf/technology/whitepapers/wp_AWO.pdf

This is a great new article by Peter Thornycroft at Aruba Networks. He covers lots of material at a level anyone can understand. He makes many great points.

Devinator

This is indeed a very good article. I really liked the way the article focused on the management level information needed to make good decisions in the large and small enterprise. Equally valuable was the distillation of fears over incompatibility with "future" "true standard" products. Although I feel it is still a probability, the author points out the reality that the closer we get to a standard that is finalized the less likely those devices released in that time window will experience problems.

Thanks for the direction, Devin.

Tom

Yes Aruba (Peter Thornycroft) did a nice job on this white paper. I like the way they handled the migration with the same form factor and enhanced chipsets. They are really making Wireless more than just an extension to the wired.

Not to be a rebel, but I too am encouraging organizations to HIGHLY think about scalability and "futureproofing" their deployments by purchasing pockets of 100/1000 L2 or L3 switches instead of investing in the legacy 10/100 switches.

If they can afford an upgrade, it could possibly save them down the road when the enterprise is bombarded with High Rate PHY capable clients.

Yep, an interesting article indeed.

So, if you're advising that we should be installing future proofed equipment, would you always advise to use a controller rather than standalone access points, and where do you stand on the new n standard ?

My custimers ask often about wireless-n....

Hi neilmac,

Good observations and worthy of further discussions.

I strongly advocate some sort of "central control "with redundancy built in for enterprises WLANs. It scales better than standalone APs for management purposes.

However I do believe standalone APs have a purpose. Call it "compughter's 10 digit rule";It's a binary thing after that. :)

Once you start getting into the double digits with the number of APs deployed, it gets harder to manage them without some sort of platform to keep track of the channelization, interference, SSIDs, security , mounting,etc.

Larger AP Density is what is needed to do things like wlan location tracking deployments. A larger AP density also assists in load share with the delay sensitivity of voice and video applications.

Hopefully, the High Rate PHY's will add some relief to this density equation and give the enterprise user that wired like experience over the air (OTA) with less "N" APs needed to produce those results.

With High Rate PHY deployments, I would definitely take advantage of the cleaner OFDM, 802.11a spectrum at 5 GHz and let the controllers with of course your expertise, architect the WLAN.

In time there will most likely be a High Rate PHY "Nphone" (2008) that will support 2X2 MIMO over the WLAN.