The second wave of 802.11ac may force the upgrade of Enterprise Ethernet Switches

The second wave of 802.11ac may force the upgrade of Enterprise Ethernet Switches

The second wave of high bandwidth of 802.11ac may force enterprises to upgrade to a faster Ethernet switch in 2015.

With the adoption of the second wave of 802.11ac wireless technology in 2015, many enterprises may need to upgrade Ethernet switches to support wireless network connections with higher bandwidth.

In 2014, many enterprises, especially high school and university, deployed the first wave of 802.11ac standard Wi-Fi. However, the second wave of 802.11ac with higher bandwidth is coming soon. The second wave 802.11ac can be used in 5 GHz and 160 MHz channels, with a maximum wireless speed of 6.93 Gbps. The maximum speed of the first wave of 802.11ac is about 1.3 Gbps, but it depends on the supporting network infrastructure. The Gigabit Ethernet edge switch can process the communication flow generated by the first wave of 802.11ac, but the second wave requires a new switch to process faster communication flow. Dell's Oro Group recently predicted that the second wave of 802.11ac technology will drive the "small upgrade cycle" of the Ethernet Switching infrastructure, including the upcoming 2.5 and 5 Gigabit Ethernet switches for applications.

The second wave of 802.11ac standards puts forward requirements for infrastructure upgrades

Access points (AP) based on the second wave of 802.11ac specifications will increase more users and higher bandwidth in the wireless network. Like all traditional Wi-Fi standards, the first wave of 802.11ac only allows access points to send multiple data streams to one client at a time, which means that there are only a few streams on the network. The second wave of 802.11ac will support multi-user, multi-input, and multi-user MIMO, that is, it allows the access point to send multiple data streams to multiple clients at the same time. This technology will allow enterprises to support more end users and applications. The employee's work efficiency will be greatly improved, but if the switch is not upgraded, the second wave of 802.11ac will not be able to achieve these changes.

Craig Mathias, head of the consulting firm Farpoint Group, said that companies should consider their network design and existing infrastructure when planning to deploy the second wave of 802.11ac standards in the future.

The switch capacity has become a problem when adapting to the first wave of 802.11ac standards, because the 802.11ac standard can support 1.3 Gbps bandwidth, and most Access Points flow out with 1 Gbps bandwidth. Most enterprises are restricted by environmental factors, such as interference, which makes the first wave of 802.11ac unable to reach its theoretical maximum speed.

"The Houston Community College is planning to fully upgrade access points to the first wave of 802.11ac standards," said Kyle Cooper, Senior Network architect at the Houston Community College, of course, the final upgrade is to the second wave of 802.11ac technology." The school has more than 26 campuses, 75,000 students and 8,000 faculty members. The access network consists of Cisco Catalyst 4500 series switches and Cisco Aironet 802.11n access points. The school needs to use the first wave of 802.11ac standards to support more users with their own devices (BYOD) and more terminals, but the second wave of 802.11ac will play a greater role.

Coopers also said: "In our high-density environment, like public areas and large classrooms, the second wave of 802.11ac can really help us ."

Cooper knows that the school's existing network will not fully support the second wave of 802.11ac technology. "From the Perspective of access points and switches, there is still much room for development and updates," he said. If the second wave of 802.11ac standards is deployed, it is inevitable to increase uplink performance and Ethernet power supply ."

Cooper and his team believe that their switches have sufficient capacity to support the first wave of 802.11ac, but to support the second wave of 802.11ac, the switch needs to be upgraded. "The Progress of the second wave of 802.11ac truly makes access switches more like core switches," he said. Our current line cards and switching infrastructure are more suitable for the first wave of 802.11ac standards as initial deployment ."

Infrastructure upgrades should not be the reason to block the second wave of 802.11ac standards

The second wave of 802.11ac technology will force infrastructure upgrades, but in the first half of 2015 enterprises may not feel this urgent. Mathias of Farpoint said that although enterprises may deploy the second wave of 802.11ac infrastructure next year, few client devices will support this standard before the second half of 2015, the client device cannot generate sufficient traffic to fill the Gigabit Ethernet port. Even in the second half of the year, there should be no infrastructure that has been upgraded to truly benefit customers from the second wave of 802.11ac technology.

However, this does not mean that enterprises should hold a wait-and-see attitude towards adopting the second wave of 802.11ac standards in 2015. If the enterprise's Wi-Fi technology update cycle is approaching and it is not ready to invest more money to transform the infrastructure, then the second wave of 802.11ac technology can be backward compatible with traditional standards.

Currently, the demand for the second wave of 802.11ac is not so urgent, but in the long run, it has an evolutionary value. In terms of wireless technology, enterprises cannot sit down, otherwise they will have to face capacity problems, just as they have encountered.

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