Can My Campus Network Support Wi-Fi 6 Network Performance?
To experience a performance improvement, a university’s network must take clients’ traffic from the wireless access point across the wired network to the data they asked for and then back. If the wired network is a bottleneck, the experience for students and faculty won’t improve.
Enterprise-class Wi-Fi 6 access points often come equipped with uplinks capable of 2.5-, 5- or 10-gigabit-per-second network interfaces. Let’s consider Wi-Fi 6’s technology requirements, as well as potential bottlenecks. What might be lurking in an aging campus network that would throttle these multigigabit speeds and disappoint users, and what equipment might need to be updated in order to support these speeds?
Access Points
Wi-Fi 6 requires new access points. Older Wi-Fi access points cannot be simply upgraded with software. The Wi-Fi 6 standard requires new hardware, the chips and radios inside the access point. If it’s been a few years since your university hung new access points, it’s time for an upgrade.
LEARN MORE: Here are five things to consider before modernizing your classrooms.
Closet Switches
Aging closet switches that uplink access points might need to be upgraded to support Wi-Fi 6. While the switches themselves don’t “speak” Wi-Fi 6, they need the capacity to carry traffic flowing in from Wi-Fi 6 uplinks. Switches with only 1Gbps uplinks are a potential bottleneck, while switches that support NBASE-T Ethernet speeds of 2.5 or 5Gbps, or even 10Gbps, are better suited for Wi-Fi 6 deployments.
While performance is top of mind when deploying Wi-Fi 6, don’t overlook power requirements. Wireless access points usually are powered via Power over Ethernet. An older PoE switch powering new Wi-Fi 6 access points might not have enough power budget to support demand.
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