802.11ac: Make The Business Case, Then Make The Move

By Christian Gilby

A seismic shift toward wireless workplaces is brewing across all industries and verticals. Behind the scenes, companies are rapidly installing – or modernizing – Wi-Fi infrastructures. The goal: Deliver the capacity and performance demanded by highly mobile employees.

Companies ranging from Oklahoma-based American Fidelity Assurance Company, which unveiled an all-wireless headquarters almost two years ago, to national restaurateur Red Lobster, where a recent headquarters update included pervasive 802.11ac Wi-Fi, are looking to mobility as way to attract and retain the best talent.

Simply put, businesses that fail to keep their WLANs up to par risk being left behind. Partners play a critical role in helping customers adopt the right technology.

To help your customers understand 802.11ac’s benefits, here’s what current adopters find attractive:

Truly mobilized workforces typically must support more than one device per person. Fortunately, Wave 2’s features improve cost efficiencies as well as performance.

Wave 1 or Wave 2: Helping Customers Decide

Early in 2016, the Wi-Fi Alliance plans to begin issuing certifications for Wave 2-compliant mobile devices, at which point we expect the availability and popularity of such devices to explode. Just like the difference between an 802.11n laptop and an 802.11ac Wave 1 tablet, Wave 2-enabled devices will offer significant feature and functionality improvements.

Meanwhile, collaboration applications like Microsoft’s Skype for Business are increasingly attractive to productivity-conscious businesses. Plus, the technologies to move up VoIP to VoWLAN (Voice over WLAN) are maturing.

For customers looking to take advantage of such trends, Wave 2 APs, while not inexpensive at first, will provide the fastest infrastructure while also protecting their Wi-Fi investments. And, even budget-constrained customers can affordably move up to Gigabit Wi-Fi by using a tiered approach that matches use cases to APs with the appropriate characteristics.

For instance, in lower-density spaces – like office hallways – lower-performance, cost-effective Wave 1 access points are frequently suitable. On other end of the spectrum, the highest-performance Wave 2 APs address the load wherever multiple people gather with multiple devices or in locations with intensive streaming needs. For areas in between, mid-performance APs may be appropriate.

Remember, like other Wi-Fi standards, 802.11ac is backward-compatible, so budget-constrained customers can make a gradual transition. And when it comes to making the business case, whether customers are updating an existing facility or starting from scratch, don’t stop with upgrading the WLAN. Help them calculate the budget advantages of cutting desktop wires altogether. As the price of copper wire continues to skyrocket, all-wireless workplaces can offer considerable savings.

How much? While this depends on the deployment, sums commonly range from thousands to millions of dollars. For example, the total cost savings was more than $1 million at Pennsylvania’s West Chester University, where 5,000 mostly existing student housing units were converted to all-wireless. In American Fidelity’s greenfield deployment, the savings were approximately $700,000.

Is Wave 2 For You?

Theoretically, Wave 2 could achieve more than twice the performance of Wave 1, but this doesn’t occur in practice. The big value it delivers is higher network utilization to support demanding apps and increasing client densities. When discussing Wave 2, consider the following:

5 Steps for Successfully Migrating to 11ac

To ease your customers’ transition to Gigabit Wi-Fi, include these five key steps in your migration plan.

Patent holder Christian Gilby is a director of product marketing at Aruba Networks with 20-plus years of experience in the networking industry, including a strong focus on mobility and wireless. Prior to Aruba, he held a leadership role at ShoreTel Mobility, after ShoreTel acquired Gilby’s mobile unified communications startup, Agito Networks. Before Agito, Gilby served as an early Meru Networks employee. He started his career at Nortel Networks.