R710 coverage and features

[chennai_itsuppo]

Hi We are currently using ZD1200 with 5 R700 AP and planning on adding two more AP but there is no enough channel on 5GHz 80 MHz so we move to 5GHz 40MHz but we are not so impress with the performance. And i heard that R710 has better coverage compare to R700. Can someone confirm that for me please... also if its true how does it enable better coverage on 5GHz ... i mean both R710 and R700 when deploy on 5GHz 80MHz they are both seems running on the same frequency to me ... please need clarification.....

[seanmuir]

Your WAN is only 75Mbps so this will not affect internet traffic.

What is your Extranet demands?

[chennai_itsuppo]

Not really John but i was kinda worried when i see the sudden increase in total airtime utilization on the 5GHz when we move to 40MHz .... and wanna make sure before users start complaining ... oh and R710 being the new AP though of may be add 2 of it and reduce the number of AP ... and though R710 may help us to reduce the airtime.... and at the same time reduce the number of APs..
And thank you for the clarification ..... oh and we enable background scanning, smartroam , band sterring and 802.1k ..etc

[john_d]

Sounds like you are doing everything correctly. It is totally normal to get an increase in airtime utilization on 5GHz when cutting the channel width in half to 40MHz. Now, 802.11ac clients may take up to twice as long to transmit the same data on a 40MHz channel as on an 80MHz channel.

Of course, you are doing this for a good reason -- you want to deploy more APs to increase capacity. 40MHz is a great setting for that.

I would definitely not recommend reducing the number of AP's. In the future, you might need/want more AP's if your number of clients or bandwidth requirements grow. Or maybe one day you'll find that a good percentage of your clients support Wave 2 and hence your whole network will benefit from MU-MIMO. That might be a good reason to introduce R710's in your denser areas.

Until then, I think you are well provisioned. I wish I could have your kind of utilization! Due to periodic machine backups on my network, my 5GHz utilization peaks at around 30-50%. But even during that kind of heavy usage, my clients still perform great, and there's no noticeable loss in performance.

It's great that you over provision your network and have invested in the best wifi solution on the market. I'm sure your users appreciate it, even if they don't know how much worse their wifi could be!

[chennai_itsuppo]

Thank you John and everyone much appreciated.