INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Cabling
The impact of
IEEE 802.11ac on
copper cabling
systems
Access points based on 802.11ac Wave 2
will add more users and more bandwidth to
the wireless network. Like all legacy Wi-Fi
standards, 802.11ac Wave 1 allows access
points to send multiple streams to only one
client at a time, which means fewer flows on
the network, explains Paul Cave, Technical
Manager, Excel Networks.
T
he current generation of
802.11ac Wave 1 products
that have been certified by the
Wi-Fi Alliance since mid 2013, deliver
a three-fold increase in performance.
This is driven by a doubling of channel
bandwidth to 80MHz, the addition of
a more efficient 256-QAM encoding
technique and explicit transmit beamforming to improve signal quality.
clients or a single radio can transmit
multiple simultaneous conversations to
different clients.
Wave 1 802.11ac supports multiple
streams to the same client much as
802.11n did (MIMO). The major change
in Wave 2 802.11ac will introduce multiuser MIMO where an access point (AP)
transmits simultaneously to multiple
Now is the time many organisations are
looking to move ahead with 802.11ac
Wave 1 products that deliver 3X the
performance of the prior 802.11n
generation. Some are even looking
towards the 802.11ac Wave 2 products
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Bear in mind that the conditions
required for the highest rates – 160MHz channels, eight spatial streams –
are not likely to be implemented in any
chipsets in the near future due to design
complexity and power requirements.
that are just starting to emerge. If this
isn’t enough to convince you of the size
of the potential impact, the following
data might give an indication of the
scale of change.
The impact on cabling infrastructure
The first point to highlight is the cabling
standards recommend that any new
cabling installation should be able to
support two full hardware technology
upgrades.
Therefore, any cabling infrastructure
needs to support a wireless LAN for
much longer than the lifetime of any
particular generation of access points.
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