Any news on 802.11ac Wave 2?

[Nicolas_Martine]

Does anyone knows if it's in roadmap for an AP?

[Michael]

Well, we ́re a public university. We received a budget for each piece of hardware, i.e. in my case budget for the given switch ports and access points

The building (purely made out of cement/steel) itself is rented. Looking at the construction plan, there ́s 1 RJ45 port in each smaller seminar room (somewhere at 3m height in one corner) besides some other ports on the ground of the room. Some into the corridors. In bigger lecture halls there are 2 (for up to 300seats), also somewhere placed into the room. The access points will be placed right beside it. Well, it has to look "nice"... No antenna design at all. Only some radio tweaking.

So, I will probably buy "AP3925" access points and hope for the best...

I don ́t know anything about the new extremenetworks access points, but this year some vendors of home wifi access points released devices with 1x 2.4Ghz and 2x 5.0Ghz radios/ASICs. This would be very helpful in our case, too.

[William_Aguilar]

I can't really argue with you wanting to be on the latest and greatest when it is available. It really comes back to ROI or risk/reward economics. Comparing apples vs apples, a Wave 2 AP will support more 11ac clients, but new features (like MU-MIMO) will limit the number of users that you can support in MU-MIMO groups, which doesn't exist with Wave 1. Keep in mind that the MU-MIMO works one-way, at least in the first iteration, for communication from the AP-to-the-client so your traffic profile will have an effect on how much you will gain from MU-MIMO when the student's devices get there. Also because the first gen of Wave 2 is 4x4:4 the cell sizes are likely smaller vs. 3x3:3 although you can support more density - the reason for the smaller cell sizes is that the total amount of power you can put out is going to be the same whether you are using a 2x2, 3x3, or 4x4 so your density is higher but your coverage is smaller. From a cabling perspective you may want to consider dropping two E/N in the new building, for resiliency in Wave 1 / 2 and for more wired bandwidth, you may push the envelope for Wave 2, but more likely for whatever comes next (802.11ax, etc.) and you want to be using Cat 5e or Cat6 to set you up long-term for 2.5G E/N. You may want to consider Cat6 for 2.5G/5G E/N if you are thinking that far out. The 4x transmitters also means more power so make sure you are going with 802.3at on all your E/N ports. As far as longevity there is plenty of runway on the Wave 1 since we support for 5 years after end-of-sale and we are not anywhere close to EOS of Wave 1. My point here is not to dissuade you one way or another but to give you some information for your planning so that you can decide which is the best for design for your deployment. Hope this helps!

Cheers,

Will

[William_Aguilar]

Extreme Networks will be announcing the Wave 2 APs before the end of the year; availability will depend in the country you are in and an estimate will be provided at the time of the public announcement. Having said that, could you expand a little bit as to why you require Wave 2 solution at this time. There is a lot of marketing hype and misinformation in the industry and we would like to keep it real . When do you expect to start rolling out Wave 2 clients?

Thanks,

Will

[Michael]

So, does anyone know whether we are talking about year 2015 or 2016 for "wave 2" products?

[Andre_Brits_Kan]

Perhaps the following webinar will be usefull but it would seem that it is postponed for now

http://learn.extremenetworks.com/Wi-Fi-solutions-ext-mena-may2015.html?mkt_tok=3RkMMJWWfF9wsRons6TAd...

You will learn:

Extreme Networks Wireless Holistic overview IdentiFi™ Unique Capabilities New Wave 2 AC Access points Network-powered application analytics and optimization solution