To the Nth Degree: 802.11n Supercharges Enterprise WLANs

It’s the applications, stupid.

That’s become the refrain for enterprise sales as businesses move from wanting basic connectivity to leveraging fatter and fatter pipes to support mission-critical apps. WLANs are no exception, and with the advent of 802.11n products — with five times the throughput of legacy WLAN gear — partners can go in with a wireless workplace story that’s been supercharged with unified communications, fixed-mobile convergence and video. As long as they get the technical requirements correct.

There are plenty of gear options to choose from to craft that story, too: The Wi-Fi Alliance has certified approximately 32 business-grade products as complying to the IEEE’s 802.11n draft 2.0 standard, which, in addition to supporting higher data rates, also offers Multiple Input/Multiple Output (MIMO) to improve coverage and density. The final iteration of the standard is still being tweaked, but current products will be compatible with (and software-upgradeable to) the final version, which is due sometime in 2009.

“The big value for channel partners is that 802.11n removes barriers,” explained Luc Roy, vice president of enterprise mobility at Siemens Enterprise Communications. “You can say that in the early days of 802.11a/b/g and wireless, partners had to open up customers to wireless and explain the value proposition. Now, with .11n, you have theoretical speeds of 300mbps, and most desktop laptops can support up to 100mbps. So all of the sudden we’re over the mental barrier of wondering if the WLAN has the capacity to support a large number of users and bandwidth-hungry applications. It’s a no-brainer.”

The faster speeds and better coverage also make for the ability to support true mobility on a WLAN, and that in turn becomes another driver. Also, unified communications in particular gets a boost from 802.11n. “Unified communications was considered really nice to have, but it becomes mandatory as soon as you become mobile,” Roy continued. “So now, UC is at the heart of every customer conversation we have about WLANs, because the two go hand-in-hand.”

He added that increasingly the customer opportunities include a bundle with an IP PBX, fixed-mobile convergence and unified communications. “It’s becoming more and more clear to the customer that they need to do this, so 802.11n opens doors for a few more opportunities and a bigger addressable market for channel partners.”

Video is another application driving enterprise demand for 802.11n, particularly in certain verticals. In health care, for instance,