I personally have pretty strong feelings about this issue and feel some frustation that too many organizations adopt a perspective of choosing between 11a and 11g. My view is that supporting both 11a and 11g provides you with more wireless capacity and better performance at only a modest increase in cost, both on the AP and on the client.
While there are certainly benefits of engineering your systems for full 11a coverage by deploying AP's in a dense configuration, even if you choose not to do that, you get benefits, as long as a reasonable percentage of users have 11a on their clients. At Syracuse, the University-standard notebook computer that is made available to students comes with ag support. I think the incremental cost of 11a from Dell was on the order of $10. Although I no longer work in central IT, if I did, I would be working closely with the Purchasing Department to insure that all institutionally-purchased notebooks included 11a support. I don't think it will be too longer before all Centrino notebooks come with ag support by default. With respect to support, this is largely transparent. In most cases, clients will attempt to associate first to 11a and roam to 11g if necessary. There are definitely some latency issues associated with roaming and some client adapters handle this better than others, but fast roaming is not usually a huge issue for notebook users, who usually need portability/nobadicity rather than true mobility, as might be required with wireless VoIP handsets. I'd love to hear arguments from people about why supporting 11a is a bad thing. It just looks like such a win to me, I don't know why everyone doesn't do it. Even if you only offload 20% of your client traffic to 11a, all of those users get better performance and you've also made things better for the 11b/11g users by offloading that traffic. dm > -----Original Message----- > From: Daniel R Jones [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Thursday, February 23, 2006 3:19 PM > To: [email protected] > Subject: [WIRELESS-LAN] 802.11a > > CU-Boulder is significantly expanding wireless in student and > academic areas. The question has been raised about support > of 802.11a. Even though our new access points support > 802.11a it may not necessary make sense to deploy the technology. > > For those who have adopted 802.11a could you answer the following > questions: > > 1) How much usage of 802.11a do you have vs 802.11b/g? > > 2) Do you have coverage of 802.11a in all locations where you > also have 802.11a or is it provided for specific applications? > > 3) Has 802.11a generated additional support calls? > > Regards, > > Dan Jones > University of Colorado at Boulder > > ********** > Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE > Constituent Group discussion list can be found at > http://www.educause.edu/groups/. > ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
