January 13, 2009, 4:41 PM — The growth of 802.11n wireless LAN access points has been somewhat limited by a well-known problem with insufficient power to APs when using Power-over-Ethernet connections.
Some companies have gone ahead with the faster 802.11n installations anyway, although they have had to string extra power cables to the 802.11n APs to give them sufficient power to run all the radios inside the APs.
Today, Cisco Systems Inc. is addressing the problem head-on by announcing a new Aironet 1140 Series Access Point that works with standard PoE. It also comes in a sleeker design for executive office settings and uses M-Drive Technology, which helps simplify wireless management and improve coverage.
The new AP is available now for US$1,299, officials said.
Ben Gibson, Cisco's senior director of mobility solutions, said the new APs would help "trigger widespread Wi-Fi deployments." Noting that Cisco has had 802.11n products on the market for more than a year, he called them "early adopter" solutions.
"Up to now, it was a compromise with Power over Ethernet, and power was not sufficient [to fully run the APs] or companies had to deploy them with [added] power," Gibson said. "A lot of people want 802.11n, but people were waiting to see if it would work with existing infrastructure."
Gibson called the new 1140 Series the "first to market with full capacity and full performance with Power-over-Ethernet power."
Two Cisco customers said they are deploying or planning to deploy the 1140s after using older 802.11n APs. Erik Parker, senior wireless infrastructure engineer at Toyota Motor Sales USA Inc. in Torrance, Calif., said power injectors had been needed for the older, 1252 series APs at Toyota. With the new APs, "we will not widely deploy power injectors," he said.
With 802.11n, wireless speeds will be fast enough that Toyota is considering allowing some desktops and mobile devices to go 100% wireless, Parker said. In all, Toyota installed about 2,400 older APs at various offices last year and plans to install 1140s in 60 locations, with potentially another 500 by the end of the year.
Scott Lapham, network engineer at Southeast Alabama Medical Center in Dothan, Ala., said the center has 500 older APs, and that moving to the 1140 should provide a "very smooth transition" since it will work well with the 802.3af PoE available throughout the facility." Lapham said he plans to deploy them, pending budget approval.
Needing to add power injectors to older PoEs would ultimately increase costs, so the 1140 with full "n" performance over standard PoE and its "sleek" design will provide needed benefits, Lapham said.
The 802.11n speeds of 100Mbit/sec. will "open doors for mobility that didn't previously exist," he added. "As applications get more complex and require more throughput to function properly, the standard 802.11 a/g connectivity just isn't enough. With the number of wireless devices growing, it is imperative for the infrastructure to grow proportionally." Using 802.11n reduces the number of APs needed as well, since 'n' provides greater range, Lapham added.
Craig Mathias, an analyst at The Farpoint Group in Ashland, Mass., and a former columnist for Computerworld, said his laboratory testing showed that early 802.11n APs required nearly 13 watts of power to operate all the radios inside, which was above the 11 watts available under standard PoE. But power sequencing in the APs can overcome the problem, something that Siemens included in its 802.11n APs, Mathias noted.
Mathias predicted that vendors would come up with 802.11n products that use the same approach to standard PoE. Cisco deserves credit for making the correction to the 802.11n APs and has been "very, very competitive" in the AP space, he said, leading the field in enterprise and residential AP shipments. Competitors include Motorola Inc., Aruba Networks Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co. and Trapeze Networks, he said.
Aside from PoE capabilities, however, Mathias said Cisco has built in the ability to use beam-forming technology in the M-Drive software to improve throughput for legacy 802.11a/g devices on the same network and to improve capacity and reduce coverage holes.
