Phillippe, this is something I would **love** to be shown to be wrong about.
I think all of us could benefit from a 4th channel (I know I would), if it comes with clear guidelines for when and how to use it in a way that will increase rather than decrease throughput. Right now, the best guidelines we have say, "Stick with 1,6, and 11." Deviation from that is more likely than not to result in pain. Perhaps what is needed is more successful 4 channel implementations for study, but I think we're likely to see mainstream 5ghz make this all obsolete by then. Joel Coehoorn IT Director York College, Nebraska 402.363.5603 [email protected] On Tue, May 8, 2012 at 2:19 PM, Hanset, Philippe C <[email protected]> wrote: > > On May 8, 2012, at 3:00 PM, Coehoorn, Joel wrote: > > The short answer is "no". It comes down to the skirts again. Most > low-end tools to measure wireless coverage do a poor job of showing this, > but my understanding is that wifi RF is such that the skirts "flare out" > quickly, and you have nearly all of the signal overlap even at fairly low > power levels. These wide skirts makes it impractical to try for four > channels... you're almost as bad off as if you tried to use all eleven. > > > Joel, > > You forgot the "black magic" part of wireless ;-) > We didn't go with theory back in 2000, but with measurements. > In a large auditorium with 100+ users and 4 APs, we were getting better > throughput with 1-4-8-11 > than with 1-6-11-1. We didn't play with smaller cells. > > Philippe > > Philippe Hanset > Univ. of TN, Knoxville > www.eduroamus.org > > > > ********** 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/.
