Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] Dual radio APs, .11n on 2.4ghz radios or not?

[Rick Brown]

Craig, Enabling N on the 2.4 is not a lost cause and will help improve performance if the coverage has been designed properly.  As of June 1st we are disabling 11B and all 11G rates below 12Mbps.  In order to help steer people to the 5Ghz band we have created an SSID that is only broadcast in that band and publicized it as higher performance. Rick On 5/26/2011 2:22 PM, Craig Simons wrote: Design question for you all: Currently we have b/g enabled on our 2.4ghz radios and a/n on our 5ghz radios as carrot to entice users to buy/use a 5ghz capable wireless adapter. However, even with band preferencing enabled (or steering depending on the vendor), we still have a 75/25% split of 2.4 to 5 users. So my question is this, is there any point of enabling .11n on the 2.4 radio given that it will be in protection mode most of the time? As I can't really enable channel bonding on the 2.4 band to get the real speed increases of .11n, will users still get better performance overall. More importantly, would I get better performance in a user dense environment (more packets transmitted by .11n clients in the same time-slice thereby freeing up the channel for other clients, etc)? I'm of the opinion that guaranteeing great wireless performance is a lost cause on the 2.4 band, but I'd like to tweak as many things as possible to get the best performance in dense areas. Regards, Craig -------------------------------------- Craig Simons Network Operations Simon Fraser University Burnaby BC, Canada em. craigsim...@sfu.ca ph. 778-782-8036 ce. 604-649-7977 tw. twitter.com/simonscraig -------------------------------------- ********** 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/.