HD Wi-Fi has become de riguer over the last two years or more and no
doubt there will be another flavour of the month soon. The reality of HD Wi-Fi as a feature is
different in that it is intangible without an easily definable outcome. Usually a solution will either work or not
work, however when you are looking to deploy HD Wi-Fi not all vendors are
equal, be that due to the chipset, the features or product portfolio.
For example if you deploy EAP-TLS, bonjour guest access or multicast you
have either standards based protocols to work with or a clearly defined goal.
The issue is one mans high density is another mans normal density.
People often say they need "high density" and ask if the proposed solution can do "high density". My immediate response is
“lets define high density” rather than “of course it can everyone's WLAN
solution can do high density”.
High density WLANs, like everything else, can only be tested once installed and tested againstthe design
brief. If there is no design brief as to how many clients, what type of
clients and what type of applications you are simply unable to measure the
success or lack thereof of your implementation. So you must absolutely define how many clients etc you will support.
Lets take a look at what two different people deem as high
density Wi-Fi
Option 1 - A WLAN deployment in a busy office with lots of
people for voice, video and data where you might get 40 clients per access
point and each access point is using omni directional antennas may be described
as high density. It certainly is higher than perhaps a normal enterprise WLAN
density nad as such may be defined as high density.
On the other hand
Option 2 – A stadium where you have 90000 people and each
access point covers 400 seats to provide data, video and location.
Option 1 there is a moderate expectation that you will be
successful with many vendors, some more successful than others. I respect that this is not that far away from a pretty standard
deployment and most enterprise class WLANs should be able to cope with this.
Lets define the high density environment as 20 seats per cell and 3 devices per seat so
we have a maximum design of 60 devices on an access point.
Simply by defining
the expected outcome if you have 61 devices and the WLAN fails you have
exceeded the design. OK we need to define in more granularity the applications
per cell etc so we do not end up with 60 voice clients but our expectation
would be a sensible split of clients and applications.
This would provide a
reasonable user experience for typical office based applications.
Option 2 where we have a stadium typically we would define
the total number of clients we could reasonably expect to have on the WLAN simultaneously
at any one time. For this example lets assume 25%. We need to use directional
antennas to segregate the RF and we want location and video as well.
Next step
is to define the video capabilities and start to manage the customer
expectations that it may not work well in all areas. Additionally with location
we will not see the granularity that we could expect in an environment that
lends itself to a location based deployment.
The requirements in the eyes of the customer are both high density Wi-Fi however the approach, expectation and usage are both very very different
and need to be managed differently. Indeed not all vendors would be able to
provide a solution for option 2 as very high density WLANs pose many different
challenges that you will only see in that type of environment. More vendors perhaps have the capability to solve the challenges of option 1.
Are they both high density or is one simply an extention of the
success of Wi-Fi and the growth of devices in the market place and new
standards like 802.11ac. All of this coupled with client and user expectation
that Wi-Fi is very much commoditised these days means we will always have
challenging situations where our Wi-Fi skills and ability to communicate
designs successfully will be tested.
What will the next flavour of the month be?
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