UPDATED 15:36 EDT / SEPTEMBER 17 2012

CIOs Should Track Two New Wireless Standards

Two new wireless standards are poised to appear in the marketplace, says Wikibon Analyst, consultant, and former CIO Scott Lowe in his latest Professional Alert. While neither of these is focused primarily on the enterprise or SMB markets, and one at least may present significant implementation challenges, CIOs should keep an eye on both and consider preparing for their eventual incorporation into the corporate infrastructure.

The first, 802.11ac, is the next step in network speed beyond 802.11n. Rather than focusing on the corporate market, however, its initial target is consumers, and specifically homes that have become crowded with high-bandwidth wireless appliances ranging from game consoles to TVs and media players that stream high definition content between devices over the home WiFi LAN.

This standard, and the products to be built on it, is of interest in the enterprise in part because it straddles the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands. Most WiFi traffic today runs on the former; the ability to also use the latter is the key to the higher speeds – theoretically in excess of 1 Gb/s – that 802.11ac promises. It operates over the 5 GHz band but is fully compatible with 802/11b/g/n networks that run on the 2.4 GHz band. It can theoretically operated at speeds in excess of 1 Gb/s.

Lowe warns, however, that eventually employees are likely to bring mobile 802.11ac devices – for instance next-generation tablets – into the office and try to use them to get extra speed from the typically dual-band 802.11n office WiFi. This could create problems, particularly if the devices use wide channels. And while this standard is still in development some vendors are already selling routers with chipsets that provide 802.11ac speeds.

In the office, 802.11ac routers could provide WiFi that could replace wired networks with equivalent capacity. It could also help businesses make a graceful transition to use of the 5 GHz band. The reason they may want to do that – 802.11u.

This second standard in development is intended to support voice-over-WiFi and specifically seamless handoffs of mobile voice traffic from one WiFi LAN to the next without requiring that the user manually link the smartphone to each LAN. This ideally will happen as effortlessly as cellular handoffs by automatically sending the user’s credentials to the next LAN. That will allow users to take advantage of extra bandwidth at public hot spots to get higher quality connections in areas such as large city centers where voice cells are sometimes overloaded and public WiFi is often ubiquitous. In an office, and particularly a large corporate, educational, or medical campus, this could allow IT to support cellular users over WiFi network rather than having to maintain a second cellular system.

The problem, however, is that 802.11u, also known as HotSpot 2.0 or “carrier offload”, will increase VoIP and mobile data traffic on the corporate WiFi network significantly, requiring more capacity. That could theoretically use that extra capacity from the 802.11ac routers.

Both of these standards are still in development, and Lowe says that as a CIO he would not list either as a high priority infrastructure upgrade for the near future. However, CIOs should be aware of both and track their development and implementation, both to stay ahead of their potential impact on the enterprise data infrastructure and for the eventual potential they promise for improving QoS and supporting the growth of mobile data traffic both from employees and over the public hot spots many consumer-facing companies provide to the public.

As with all Wikibon research, this case history is available free of charge on the Wikibon.org Web site. IT professionals are invited to register for free Wikibon membership, which allows them to post comments, correct articles, and post their own research. It also allows them to receive invitations to Peer Incite Meetings, at which users present on their experiences solving specific common issues such as data backup and recovery using advanced solutions, and to receive the Wikibon Peer Incite newsletter.


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