Will Access Points ever need two data points?

[psydii]

So at the time (several years ago - Caveat lector), all the vendors said "trust us, anything over 4x4 is only for enterprises who want to spend silly money, it does not offer good return on investment for your scenario" this conversation was in the ac wave 2 era not ax They also strongly implied that while ax will be faster, it will take a long time before the types of devices to make it faster would be ubiquitous and affordable. Looks to me like 8x8 is in Aruba's flagship AP only. I still suspect that their advice holds, however I am several years out from my last detailed analysis.

 

The technical reps were pleased to see MU-MIMO working quite so well in a classroom environement as on paper as mavhc says, is not quite ideal spacing.

 

I would recommend anyone run a multi-room test on 8x8 APs before spending money on them. At some point they may fall into the sweet spot in the affordablity/performace matix. Maybe they are already, I don't know.

 

As for 80 vs 40... it made not much difference at peak load. Over half the clients at the time didn't support 80 so the aps fell back to 40 for those transmissions, But the APs extended to 80 where they could. If we absolutely needed a higher minimum transmissionrate under load, we would have to have much higher densitiy of APs and 20Mhz channels. However in practice what we need is good-enough performance under multi-client load, and highest throughput affordable on an occasional basis (photos/video syncing), because most people want responsiveness not guaranteed minimum throughput.