With the New 802.11ac Standard will Come New Challenges

While the latest IEEE 802.11ac standard is still in development the promises of throughput improvement and speed are garnering a lot of interest in its approval. With mobile devices and new technology continuing to access organization’s network this anticipation is understandable. The improvements to the 802.11 standards that will affect user performance revolve around transfer speed, range and multi-user performance. All things need to help ensure network reliability when the number of clients access a network continues to increase and use bandwidth.

However, for those looking to upgrade to the latest 802.11ac standard upon approval it will not be as easy as flipping a switch. Like all other new technologies there will be a period of transition, progression and challenges that developers and end users will have to address moving forward. A recent article written by Dave Schneider, Principal Technologist, at Ixia talks about some of the early challenges 802.11ac adopter will have to handle. From testing to reliability to compatibility with current network technology solutions Schneider provides some use full information that should help moving forward.

To summarize, Schneider points to five areas of focus that will allow developers and users to realize the promises of higher throughput and density that 802.11ac should offer.

1. Ensuring graceful migrations from existing deployed solutions by providing backward compatibility.

2. Delivering high performance RF transmission and receive performance with a wide variety of signals.

3. Maintaining high performance to multiple clients under real-world channel conditions.

4. Providing the high reliability and feature robustness to enable enterprise and carrier grade 802.11ac adoption.

5. Ensuring that the key application traffic, most notably video, can be delivered with quality.

Click here to read more on these issues and to view Schneider’s entire article.