Practical Considerations for Deploying 802.11n
By Siemens Enterprise Communications
There is a lot of confusion surrounding the capabilities and status of the new 802.11n WiFi standard. Full ratification is not expected until mid-2009. However, the WiFi Alliance (WFA) launched a compatibility testing and certification program for 802.11n infrastructure and clients based on the Draft 2 standard which removes much of the deployment risk and accelerated the 802.11n market. Two of the major issues to consider when planning for 802.11n are power consumption and WLAN architecture. 802.11n hardware from many vendors requires significantly more than the 12.95 Watts guaranteed by the current PoE standard, 802.3af. The second major issue to consider is the increased traffic on your core network arising from high-throughput 11n WLANs. It is important that your WLAN solution provide flexibility for traffic forwarding and network segmentation.
As with any new technology, there are plenty of issues and caveats to take into consideration, but 802.11n is ready for enterprise deployment today. It provides a standard for WLAN performance and reliability that supplement the existing security standard (802.11i) and QoS standard (802.11e) to make WLAN as fast, secure and reliable as wired LAN.
