Radio Settings - Enable Frame Burst & Explicit Beamforming?

[paulainslie]

Over 90% of our client devices are 802.11ac. What is the risk/disadvantage to enabling the following settings? (I asked this question 4 years ago, but we had too few 802.11ac clients.)

 Enable Frame Burst

 Enable Transmit Beamforming (Explicit)

The area is resort/camp/conference and has many outdoor AP's that serves a wider area (including trailers) as well as indoor AP's in conference rooms. We have two use cases:

a) up to 70 smart phone clients per 5.8GHz radio of lighter http traffic (AP230's and AP1130's )

b) 25-50 smart phone, tablet & some laptop clients per 5.8GHz radio of busier http use including video streaming. This is people in trailers depending on an outdoor AP1130.

[samantha_lynn]

The main draw back to using frame burst is that if you have any interference in the area, you'll be sending more traffic in to a problematic space faster, increasing the interference and essentially shredding the signal. This guide reviews how to check for and mitigate interference, in case you want to see what the interference looks like now: https://thehivecommunity.aerohive.com/s/article/Radio-Frequency-Interference-NG

Beamforming would be helpful for your outdoor areas, we'd just want to avoid it on the indoor APs if they're in a smaller space. It wouldn't really harm much, there just isn't a lot of benefit from beamforming in smaller areas, and it does take a little more of the APs processing to perform beamforming.