Thoughts on mgig switching

[AdBurl]

Good evening all

I was looking for some advice/opinions please.  I have seen similar posts put they are a couple of years old and I'm wondering if people's experiences or opinions have changed in that time?

We are shortly moving into a location that is a 'landscraper', only two floors but they are pretty large. Density of occupancy could be in the region of 800 5ghz clients per floor, and will need in the region of 40 APs per floor depending on what the surveys come back with.  So we are looking at 20mhz channels.

The vast majority of our traffic is O365, Teams etc with local internet break out, so the amount of local LAN traffic is minimal.  There will be two active/active 1gbps WAN connections.

We are looking at having some element of future proofing and are investigating the possibility of mgig switches (MS350?) and MR57 APs (currently using MR56 throughout the rest of the estate).  Our current laptops do not support wireless 6e but I would expect future devices to.

Has anyone done anything similar, I appreciate this kit is relatively new so might not be widely used, or have any thoughts on whether we would be better spending on additional APs?  I suspect the that traffic generated at present would not require Mgig technology, but it would be a shame to buy ms225 or ms250 switches and then have to move to MS350 or similar down the line.

Any opinions and advice gratefully received.

Thanks

[KarstenI]

At a customer location we have quite a few MR57 that we run with 40MHz width and dual 5GHz as there are so little 6GHz clients at the moment. The Access layer are mainly MS225, so no MGig. The uplink rate is far away from 1 Gig and also new floors don’t get equipped with MGig switches. Our main thought is that we (in Germany) won’t use 80MHz channels for quite some time. And even with 80 on 6 GHz and 40 on 5 GHz, we will only hit the 1Gig uplink from time to time. And for that it is not financially useful to invest in MGig switches already. And with the MR57 having dual uplinks (which we don’t have at all AP locations) I am pretty sure we are fine with that for quite some time.

[AdBurl]

Thank you for sharing your experience.  I am anticipating that we will do something similar with the MR57s.  We currently use MS225s elsewhere and it also seems the most likely option.  It will be at least a couple of years until we have clients that can fully utilise 6ghz as well.

[PhilipDAth]

Mgig would be nice, but you are going to have a total of 2Gb/s of Internet connectivity.

If each AP had a 1Gb/s connection, that is 40Gb/s of raw bandwidth - so there is already plenty of connectivity in the access layer to saturate the Internet bandwidth available.

I'm going to guess you'll have 250 or so users (assuming each user has up to 3 devices).  That is a ratio of about 6 or 7 users per AP - so you have plenty of APs.

I guess if you moved to 10Gb/s Internet in the future your peak throughput per AP could be limited.  Could you see that happening in the future?

[AdBurl]

Thanks for the reply and for sharing your thoughts, it is much appreciated.

I worded it slightly wrong in that we would have 800 clients per floor.  In very specific circumstances as an absolutely maximum we might have 800 corporate devices connected to the 5ghz per floor.  Non-corporate devices would be connected to the 2.4ghz guest network.  But 800 would be a very unlikely theoretical maximum.  I'd expected 400 people per floor was a more likely 'norm'.  And of course they wont choose to space themselves evenly. Hence the need for quite a few APs.

If cost allows then we will be providing 1gig cdr on a 10gig bearer, but unless applications come along that are very bandwidth intensive I don't anticipate us getting to 10gig any time soon.  As you suggest the WAN links are the likely bottleneck for some time.

[cmr]

We do have MS355s at a number of sites now and we also have some 9166 APs at one of those sites.  We have had some fun connecting them at speeds above 1Gb, with 2.5Gb being possible over a mixed CAT5e STP / CAT6 STP run and 5Gb capable over a mixed CAT6 STP / CAT6a STP run.  The APs will try to negotiate other speeds, but we have fixed on what is stable.

In terms of what @PhilipDAth said above, he is absolutely right in that you will be unlikely to notice any benefit of the links being above 1Gb unless you are going to move to faster internet connections, or have on-site destinations for clients.

[AdBurl]

Thanks for sharing your experience

[Speedbird1]

We have pretty much the same setup as @AdBurl. Recently added CW9166 to our fleet with MS355 Mgig switches. 

We thought .. why not might as well get the mgig switches too. 

All new locations will go this way too. 

If you have the budget you might as well.