Expanding Your Network, Creating More Bandwidth

When you think about it, your network is a lot like the road to a small town on the cusp of an incredible population explosion. There’s a nice infrastructure supporting the small amount of people leaving and returning, and that’s all that’s needed. As more people find out about this wonderful place, the town grows and that two-lane highway can’t support the influx of new people making their lives there. Suddenly there are traffic snarls, roads are constantly in disrepair and trash is strewn everywhere.

The town grew too fast and it needed better, wider roads to allow traffic to flow freely.

Thanks to more devices, data-intensive apps (video and Voice Over Wi-Fi) and the Internet of Things, your network is going to witness a boom similar to that small town—and it’s going to be sooner than you think. Unlike that town that was blindsided by change, you can anticipate and proactively solve this growth problem right now.

For a full overview of the recent Cisco NPI Launch, click here.

Cisco Aironet 2800 and 3800 Series Access Points (APs) are the high-performance products that enlarge your bandwidth and eliminate data gridlock. These are the world’s most versatile access points, which meet 802.11ac Wave 2 standards and provide a theoretical connection rate of up to 2.6 Gbps per radio. That’s roughly double the rates offered by today’s high-end 802.11ac APs. And you’re going to need all the bandwidth you can get, as a recent study shows that within three years, the majority of fixed IP traffic will be Wi-Fi (53 percent), exceeding wired traffic by 21 percent.

Understanding that statistic, if you haven’t updated your networks in some time, you’re definitely going to need to. The Aironet 2800 and 3800 are a great place to start and come equipped with the following innovations for a better, more robust bandwidth:

1. Flexible Radio Assignment: Every minute your environment changes; sometimes there may be 30 or more people in a conference room and other times it may be empty. The Aironet 2800 and 3800 Access Points will automatically recognize these discrepancies too. With two radios in the access point, when there is a greater need for bandwidth, the 2.4GHz radio will understand the situation and switch to a 5GHz radio. When that increased need subsides, the radio can either switch back to 2.4GHz or go into security monitoring mode and scan the perimeter for rogue agents.

2. Multiuser multiple-input, multiple-output (MU-MIMO) technology: When you have a large crowd of people all using their devices to connect to the same bandwidth, the Wi-Fi speed tends to slow down. That’s single-user (SU) MIMO at work. But with MU-MIMO supporting three spatial streams, you get significantly faster performance over more clients. Why? It’s simple, MU-MIMO allows the access point to send multiple data packets to multiple clients over the same frequency.

3. Mutligigabit Ethernet support: Providing multiple gigabit uplink speeds of 2.5 Gbps and 5 Gbps in addition to 100-Mbps and 1-Gbps speeds for NBASE-T over Cat6a and 10GBase-T cabling. This allows up to five times the speeds in enterprise without replacing cabling infrastructure.

4. High-Density Experience: Best-in-class RF architecture that provides high-performance coverage for a high density of client devices, giving the end user a seamless wireless experience. Features include custom hardware in 802.11ac Wave 2 radios, Cisco CleanAir®, Cisco ClientLink 4.0, cross-access point noise reduction, and an optimized client roaming experience.

5. 160-MHz Channel Support: Supporting channels up to 160 MHz wide, Dynamic Bandwidth Selection allows the access point to dynamically switch between 20-, 40-, 80-, and 160-MHz channels, depending on the RF channel conditions, providing the industry’s best-performing wireless network.

All of these functionalities, plus loads more, allow your access points—and your network—to run at peak performance. These new products from Cisco allow you and your wireless network to be ready for the inevitable wave of 802.11ac Wave 2 consumer devices when they become available.

That way you’re one step ahead of the curve and your data isn’t stuck on some two-line high way moving at a snail’s pace.

Learn more about Cisco Aironet 2800 here and the Cisco Aironet 3800 here.