Evolution of tech will eventually push 1G into mGig (naturally), same way 10/100 was pushed out a while ago. My assumption is in 10 years, I don't think you'll be able to buy a 1G switch anymore lol.
As for now:
Wi-Fi 6 , nah
Wi-Fi 6E (still at least 3+ years away for 'large' client adoption as well) - then yeah mGig might actually be nice to have. Need is a strong word because of WAN limitations, but if your traffic is LAN based, and your rocking 160MHz on 6E, or using all 3 bands on the radio, then yeah mGig will actually come into play.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gvB5MCi9do
With 6E, 80 is going to be the new 20, with regard to MHz.
If your in a country that will get all new 1200MHz, then there will be more 80MHz channels in 6GHz, than 40MHz in 5 GHz, currently. Bonus - none of them are going to be DFS, so yeah.
The only scenario I can see of going below 80MHz in 6GHz space would be for stadium/LPV deployments.
Actually, in those scenario's you would be least likely to need more than 1G. More clients will reduce TPUT overall dramatically. Stadium deployments 1 client ends up with 200 to 500Kbps each when pushed to the limit.
Joe, let me preface this by saying its nice to have someone else to talk to about this stuff. Although it seems like we might be going off on a tangent from the original topic, my response was still oriented around the uplink port being 1G or higher as a requirement.
What I am getting that currently its only in lab scenario's, or 80MHz environments (rare) where we can push over 1G, however with more clients on the AP (such as very high density VHD) your overall total AP throughput will decrease due to contention.
Also, it has been many years since I did anything close to a VHD installation, so my 200 - 500Kbps was from memory. So you forced me to dig up some old documents I referenced at the time.
I also have limited experience with Wi-Fi 6 (as I assume most do still), so I can reference this link here which covers it some:
https://divdyn.com/wi-fi-throughput/
To clarify, I'm talking VHD with tens of thousands of clients. The RF is the limiting factor at such scale, pretty much any AP vendor has the hardware to handle excessive client counts these days, but you won't be able to squeeze much when you have 100 or more clients on a radio, due to the RF itself I mean, since its a finite resource etc.
I can't imagine any scenario in a VHD setup were you would be running anything other than 20MHz, so that alone (just looking at MCS rates) will be the determining factor of total throughput per AP. Even a 3SS client (laptop only in this example, since handhelds don't go above 2x2 that I'm aware of) at MCS11 is 366Mbps, then cut that in half because wifi 😃
Example
20MHz AP with 100 1SS clients
72Mbps * 50% / 100 = 360Kbps
Realistically it would likely be even lower since the 50% is more like 40% due to contention and fall off. So more like 250Kbps each.
To be fair there are a million scenario's that I'm not accounting for, so yes good TPUT can fluctuate all over the place. However when dealing with numbers at such scale, it's been my experience that math has to be performed to get a rough idea of what we are looking at to set expectation with client etc.
Some links from Aruba (which I consider the holy grail for VHD design) from people who have a thousand times more experience than I do with VHD deployments.
