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Cisco To Unveil Wireless Mesh Hardware
An anonymous reader writes "CRN is reporting that Cisco will enter the wireless mesh networking fray next week. Since aquiring Airespace Cisco has been working hard to bring their own mesh technology to fruition. The new solution will target businesses who wish to move the traditional Wi-Fi network outside and possibly cover large regions."
We have multiple large warehouses with truck mounted and handheld Symbol wireless devices and each warehouse has 10 or more access points. One issue we have at times is with roaming. The current Symbol software has a bug and will not let go of an access point as readily as it should causing obvious connection issues. Does anyone know if this will address the issue as a possible work around? I will be interested in seeing if Cisco's 1200 series can also be used in conjunction with this new access point to create a mesh since we have rolled out a large number of them very recently to replace the nasty old 350s.
For I am Cletus.The.Wonder.Sloth IPv6.5
This is really cool. Now it becomes almost trivally easy for people to resell internet access and break the backs of the monopolies of cable and DSL internet access providers. And if this were combined with satelite downlink, everybody could have some seriously fast access for a minimal cost. Bring it on!
Best regards.
Since aquiring Airespace Cisco has been working hard to bring their own mesh technology to fruition.
Will the hardware be upgradeable to the future IEEE 802.11s standard for mesh networks?
If your really need this then they should buy it, otherwise it may be a better idea to wait.
Having messed with current mesh systems (WDS), I'm not very satisfied. The problem that you find is that the radio can only recieve or send at any given moment. Wi-Fi is half-duplex. The effect of this is that every hop you have, you are cutting your available bandwidth by 1/2. Also, reliability goes down the toilet and you add the problem of dumb repeaters circulating packets like highschoolers passing a joint around behind the gym.
If you were to have a mesh network using up TWO wireless channels, each AP having two radios, you could break this bottleneck and have a fake-full-duplex network, meaning you'd basically just tack on a few ms of latency for each hop. Problem solved, no ground-breaking research needed. The problem with it? They would never make a dual-radio WRT54G, so I'd have to pay a bloated price (Probably 4x the price of a single-radio AP) due to economies of scale and such.
One way I made a fake mesh (Which was really more of a star but without so much bandwith cut) was to have a backhaul channel of 14(illegal) and just have a central AP on that chan. On the remote router end, I'd have a client on chan 14, and then an actual AP for the public connected to it by CAT5. Hey, it's rigged.. but it works.