Yes the math and real performance does not add up. I am comfortable relying on 1 gig uplinks for now. There may be "special case" areas the you could consider needing more uplink but I agree with many of the other responders to this. Legacy clients, consumer grade clients, designing toward capacity rather coverage really divide the load and reduce some of the chances of hitting the Gig bottleneck.
I have also seen a decrease in client throughput capability now that clients are moving from "N" to "ac". All of our "N" cards were 3 streams. All the new PC's with "ac" cards are 2 Streams. If I am designing my 5Ghz at 40 Meg channels the older 3 stream "N" can run faster than a new "ac" client minus the other "ac" features of course. I have recently seen some installs where 2 or 3 cables are pulled per AP and have been considering this but I think I will keep it to 1 cable at this point. Tracking and storing those extra cables will really multiply idle cabling in our closets. I am sure that by the time we need that much more uplink per AP we may be in the area doing other upgrades as well. John Cosgrove Network Staff Specialist Penn State Hershey College of Medicine From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Constituent Group Listserv [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Hinson, Matthew P Sent: Tuesday, March 24, 2015 10:38 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [WIRELESS-LAN] 1GBE as a bottleneck to APs? I've seen a few articles here and there regarding possible solutions for "the gigabit bottleneck" as it pertains to .11ac access points. Said solutions include Cisco's forthcoming protocols for 2.5G and 5G over CAT5 cabling as well as LACP'ing two gigabit ports per switch and AP as some vendors suggest... My question for the group is: Has anyone actually seen a throughput issue using gigabit to the edge? Certainly your distribution layer gear could be a limitation if it's not specced correctly, but I've just never seen a situation where I've wished for more than 1000BASE-T to an AP. Our fastest 802.11ac access points can "only" hit 600-700mbit/s real TCP throughput, and that's in ideal, almost laboratory conditions. Thoughts? Thank you! Matthew Hinson Network Operations ********** 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/.
