Hello, this is Bruce Miller and I am VP of Product Marketing here at Xirrus. As a contributor to the Xirrus blog, I will start by telling you a bit about me. I have been in the networking and communications industry for over 20 years in marketing, business development, and engineering roles. At Xirrus, I have led product marketing, product management, customer support, and training functions at different points in time over the past 5 years. Before Xirrus, I held roles at Ixia, Lucent, Cabletron, NetVantage, and Plexcom covering technologies including switching, routing, wireless, storage, DSL, and cable. And I was involved in the development of the original 802.1Q and .1p VLAN and QoS standards in the IEEE.

Let’s kick things off with tips on supporting tablets on your wireless network. The iPad started the craze just 2 years ago and adoption has exploded since. Tablets operate much more like a phone than a laptop from the perspective of the network. They have lower wireless transmit power, single antenna design, and a maximum data rate of 65Mbps – well below 802.11n’s 450Mbps max. So designing a wireless network for tablets is fundamentally different than designing for laptops. A couple key recommendations:

• Design for -65dBm minimum signal coverage everywhere (the same as for a phone)
• Design for both 5GHz and 2.4GHz Wi-Fi support at -65dBm everywhere. The iPad supports 5GHz (yeah!) which will translate to better wireless performance so be sure to leverage this.