Are You Ready For the New Standard of Wi-Fi?

The new wireless standard, the 892.11ac Wave 2 Wi-fi, will give your college campus the boost it needs. If you’ve been on the fence about whether or not to make the leap to Wave 2, we’ve outlined some the features here for you:

• It can better handle multiple input and multiple output (or MIMO), which means that an access point can communicate with multiple clients at the same time.
• Devices compatible with Wave 2 will be easier to manage, which puts a rest on bandwidth usage.
• Conserves more battery life of devices due to the multiuser capability and the throughput
• Mobile devices can now be better connected without the threat of too much bandwidth being used to support them
• It has an enhanced speed, with a ceiling of 6 Gbps.

Wave 2 offers a support of speeds up to 2.34 Gbps, a vast improvement upon Wave 1’s 1.3 Gbps.

However, that is not all. For those operating on Wave 1, you may wonder how Wave 2 builds upon the functionality of Wave 1. Here are a few of the ways: Wave 2 offers a support of speeds up to 2.34 Gbps, a vast improvement upon Wave 1’s 1.3 Gbps. Wave 2 also offers the option to have 160-MHz-wide channels, which means students will be able to download course content at faster rates than ever before.

Wave 1-compatible hardware is not compatible with Wave 2.

One potential drawback to any upgrading is the cross-compatibility of hardware, as upgrading may mean buying new hardware entirely. Sometimes, upgrades will grandfather in, so to speak, the older technology. Unfortunately, Wave 1-compatible hardware is not compatible with Wave 2. Upgrading to Wave 2 requires new hardware due to the fact that Wave 2 must support all of the aforementioned features as well as a fourth spatial stream, should an organization opt to use one.