September 19, 2013, 2:24 PM — Amid reports that the use of mobile devices will double by next year, IT and network managers should be taking a look at their network infrastructures to make sure they can handle the load. That means addressing not only Wi-Fi access point (AP) densities and throughput capacity, but back-end switches and power-over-Ethernet (PoE) infrastructures, as well.
After all, networking has always had a domino effect: the faster the traffic comes in, the faster the connections need to be at the back end to avoid dreaded network bottlenecks so you can see real performance increases.
A report issued by this week by technology solutions provider CDW, a Fortune 500 company, and conducted by O’Keeffe & Company, determined that 90 percent of IT professionals surveyed expect growing use of personal mobile devices to have major impacts on their organizations’ networks. Among those impacts:
- Increased bandwidth requirements (63 percent)
- Increased network latency (39 percent)
- Increased server requirements (44 percent) and storage requirements (37 percent)
According to the report, Mobility at Work, more than a third of respondents (39 percent) said they have already seen network performance suffer. What to do?
Research conducted by the Enterprise Mobile Hub indicates that many organizations are on the fast track to implementing 802.11ac, the next Wi-Fi standard delivering 1Gbps speeds, as one way to cope. More than half of respondents to a May EMH poll indicated they might upgrade to 802.11ac either as soon as possible or by the end of the year (see chart).
Another 42% said they might be inclined to do so when the standard’s multi-user, multiple input, multiple output (MU-MIMO) technology becomes ready sometime next year. With MU-MIMO, Wi-Fi APs can send different users' data along diverse spatial streams, across up to eight paths simultaneously, to improve throughput.
What are you doing to prep your network for the next mobile traffic onslaught? Tell us here.
