With 11ac, The WLAN Industry Owes Customers A New Kind Of Network Switch

I realize I'm beating the 11ac thing up pretty good lately, but I think I finally hit on what bugs me about the way the new hot technology is being brought to market. What I'm about to describe is more of a BAN issue (BAN=BigAss Network, where APs are counted in the hundreds or thousands) and not so much of concern for smaller environments.

802.11ac is being delivered in rather bizarre (for the customer) "waves".

• Wave 1: Data rates to 1.3 Gbps. You'll do fine (for most new first wave APs) with a single Gig uplink, and many new APs will work on 802.3af POE, not yet requiring .3at. Fine, good. No real squawks.


• Wave 2: You get the joy and cost of recabling your environment to add a second Gig uplink, doubling the number of switchports in use for the WLAN and configuring Etherchannels, and depending on what vintage switches you have- upgrading them for latest POE standard, all to help get to data rates likely to realistically be between 2 and 2.5 Gbps best case.

And this is where I say "time out". I'd like the WLAN makers to bear some of that Wave 2 logistical pain. And I want them to get creative to take the onus off of the customer. Here's what I want:

• In simplest terms- I don't want to use two cable runs. And I don't want the complexity and risk of 4000 more Etherchannels for my APs. But I still want the benefits of 11ac Wave 2.


• I would like the WLAN vendors to put their brilliant minds (and that I do mean sincerely- these guys and gals accomplish amazing, amazing stuff) to work to come up with a new switch or mid-span injector. Here's the requirements:
  
  
  
  • No feature bloat. May not even need to be VLAN aware.
  
  
  • Provides lots of PoE
  
  
  • Somehow puts 2 Gbps of uplink to an AP on a single UTP run without requiring me to configure a port channel
  
  
  • Cost effective (by customer standards), no licensing BS, and ultra-reliable
  
  
  
  

Spare me the lecture that there is no such thing as 2 Gig Ethernet, and that what I'm asking for would be based in no existing standard. The WLAN industry has long since turned it's back on standards and interoperability, which is why vendor lock prevails. Other than PoE and what comes out of the antenna (and even that can be a dubious discussion), the mention of standards is a joke in the WLAN industry as each vendor authors their own technical magic. So be it- I just want new magic and don't care that it's not exactly Ethernet in the middle.

I'm OK feeding this new component a 10 GB uplink that it then divvies up into auto-configured 2 Gbps AP uplinks of some proprietary protocol. Or feeding it 2 single-gig ports on my wireless management VLAN that it then magically muxes into a 2 Gbps, big powered uplink that connects via a single wiring run (of excellent quality, of course) to each AP. At that point, all of MY work was done in the closet, and I didn't run a slew of new wires for my wireless network.

If we don't get something disruptively creative on the wired side to go along with 11ac, pretty much any TCO discussion on new 11ac ownership presented by WLAN vendors will be incomplete at best, and poppycock at worst. I've seen both announced and unannounced 11ac products- and the prices are pretty steep (well, except for Ubiquity). But we're supposed to believe that 11ac lets us draw down the wired network considerably, and so be willing to buy into a higher premium for wireless. But... adding lots of new switchports and cabling runs (not trivial in many environments,  can add hundreds of dollars in cost to real TCO for each AP) has to be considered.

As a customer, I feel OK asking- because the customer is always right (well, except when they're wrong). So... when will my new non-standards-based 2 Gbps mega-PoE switches arrive?

So... When Do You Jump In On 11ac? Like Really?

The blogosphere is awash with speculation on how 802.11ac is going to transform the way we use wireless, and what the new WLAN will do for productivity. It's great stuff, and needs to be talked up. We see early releases of actual 11ac draft product, great whitepapers from the Big Guns, and even better blogs on 11ac from some of the best wireless minds in the industry. If you're not getting a working knowledge of 11ac by now, it's not for lack of available information.

Never has WiFi been more complex, more promising, and more confusing. I don't mean technically confusing; if you're a wireless professional, you'll wrap  your head around the technical side of 802.11ac. Some of my own frequent talking points on 11ac:

• yeah, the standard promises up to 6.9 Gbps data rates. But 11n also promises up to 600, and we'll never see it. Real initial 11ac offerings are still going to be measured at speeds slightly better or even the same as 11n's best


• the 5 GHz-only thing is great for everyone, and will help de-congest the ugly 2.4 GHz band


• early client devices have to be watched- a 3x3 11ac Macbook pro will run circles around a TP-Link 1x1 USB adapter, but they both "are" 11ac. Real client throughputs on 11ac are going to be all over the place


• the Wave 1/Wave 2 thing is really gonna be a weird one for people who have to plan when to jump in, and killer features like Multi-User-MIMO don't materialize until the second wave


• Regardless of how 11ac plays out in the trenches, Ethernet needs to start being more aggressively marginalized. Limited budgets can't support competing access technologies, and mobility will become more of  trump factor when dollars get spent

This brings me back to my question- When do different organizations start migrating to 11ac? This is the part that is confusing.

Talking with Cisco and Aerohive back a few months, the topic of life-cycle came up in relation to 11ac. If you have old gear and have to upgrade, first-wave 11ac might make sense in that you can skip right past 11n. But if you are like me, and have a fairly recent 11n build-out and no real performance pain points, it's just not as easy of a paradigm. Stop-gaps like Cisco's 3600 AP 11ac radio module help bridge the technological generation gap between 11n and 11ac deployments, but at an estimated $500 a pop list price, may not be worth the cost. Upgrading twice to 11ac for the first and second waves is a thorny proposition.

For small environments, lesser AP counts do remove some of the complication. But when you have hundreds or thousands of access points, you can't help but scratch your head when it comes to thoughts of moving to 11ac.

Personally, I am hoping to see a first-wave AP emerge that is somehow upgradeable to a full-fledged second-waver. But I'm also aware of the complexity of putting these things together, and building a 4x4 AP that can "expand" to the likes of 8 streams isn't likely. Also, close monitoring of client device types in use (we're a huge BYOD environment) will be a must while we watch how new 11ac devices trickle in.

For now then, I guess it's still a game of watching and waiting. Hopefully soon we'll see announcements from the WLAN makers that somehow help those of us driving really big WLANs to see a sensible path forward that doesn't include a "buy THIS 11ac AP today, then buy THAT 11ac next year" recommendation.