Wireless LANs supply an Experience of “Wires Without Borders” by Implementing Standard 802.11 RF and Protocols.

It sure doesn’t mean wires. It doesn’t mean the plug and play simplicity of cable and jacks, nor the consistent data rates of cable as long as the router keeps up, and certainly not the slam dunk interoperability of Ethernet protocols.

But wireless does its best to supply an experience of “wires without borders” by implementing standard 802.11 RF and protocols. The Wi-Fi manufacturers really do make hardware that gets along independently of brand. It’s just that the complexity and technology limitations add a level of uncertainty to the process. The user (server as well as client) must deal with the vagaries of propagation anomalies, time delay and collision behaviors, and protocol selection (802.11b/a/g/n/…). But the average user or IT professional seldom has the technical expertise to understand all of the protocols, implementation settings, and deployment subtleties associated with wireless.

Hence, if you’re in charge of a WLAN (especially a decent sized deployment) you look to your network management system (NMS) to help you out. And it can. But the NMS typically treats only the top level concerns of the WLAN management problems – what frequencies to set for adjacent APs, traffic type, and security. However, a lot more should be controllable (optimized, actually) for a WLAN to perform at its peak. Experience shows that the average WLAN is operating at between thirty to sixty percent of its potential capacity. So, would you rather throw more APs at your system or find a way to optimize what you’ve already paid for?