Infotech Lead America: Cisco now offers new products that support the 802.11ac Wi-Fi standard to help businesses address the increasing demand for network bandwidth fueled by the rapidly increasing number of employee-owned mobile devices. These products will also help manage bandwidth-intensive workloads like high-definition video and Web conferencing.
The 802.11ac Wave 1 Module for the Cisco Aironet 3600 Series which was announced in October last year is currently available. This module can support Wi-Fi speeds of up to 1.3Gbps to protect investment and give customers the flexibility to decide when and where to deploy wireless. Customers can later migrate to the high capacity 802.11ac Wi-Fi standard whenever they wish.
In its Visual Networking Index released earlier this year, Cisco estimated that that worldwide mobile data traffic will increase 13-fold by 2017, mainly due to the increasing number of Internet connections. Cisco also said there will be 5.2 billion mobile users by that time, more than 10 billion mobile connections and growth in mobile video, which will represent 66 percent of worldwide mobile data traffic.
Future versions of the Cisco Aironet 3600 Series field upgrade module will be able to support the second part of the 802.11ac standard Wave 2, which includes MU-MIMO. MU-MIMO offers switchlike performance in a wireless environment and higher bandwidth support through additional spatial streams and channels.
Cisco’s new products have been adopted globally by hospitals, universities, law firms and other organizations looking to support the growing number of devices connected to their wireless networks. The products support high-bandwidth applications, such as HD streaming video, Web conferencing, and data backup and transfers.
According to a Cisco research, by 2017, mobile network connection speeds will increase, and accordingly the average bit rate of content accessed through the mobile network will increase.
802.11ac operates in the 5GHz range. Cisco’s field-upgradeable modules extends the battery life of mobile devices.
The Methodist Hospital System and the University of New South Wales (UNSW) are some of the adopters of Cisco’s 802.11ac products. Both organizations needed a solution that would help accommodate mobile devices in greater quantity while improving performance.
