Why having multiple frequency devices that operate in 802.11 a/b/g /n are important in mission critical enterprise computing.

Why having multiple frequency tablets that operate in 802.11 a/b/g /n are important in mission critical enterprise computing.

Most enterprises that rely on wireless networks for mission critical applications employ an mixed frequency approach using both 2.4 and 5GHz  to support different levels of quality of service. This is necessary because of the interference and congestion issues that surround 2.4 GHz only wireless network deployments. Hospital environments and other types of businesses that are carrying mixed use traffic, i.e. public and private network access, need to be able to assure that certain traffic is given a higher priority than others.

As you can imagine a user trying to get important, perhaps lifesaving patient data on the same network frequency that a guest user is downloading a YouTube video of a dancing cat can be problematic if enough bandwidth is not available to both.

Because access to the internet and intranet is important to guests, visiting physicians and other “non-enterprise” customers, it is not unusual to use up the existing 2.4GHz bandwidth, therefore  mission critical data needs to be able to flow over 5GHz frequencies that consumer oriented devices cannot use.

Additionally there are a lot of issues that arise out of the use of 802.11n 40MHz channel width in both 2.4 and 5GHz that can pose a real challenge to VOIP handsets and other devices that do not have the necessary client side capabilities to handle a mixed use a/g/n environment.

An example of this would be the separation  of a single 5Ghz channel for rendering PACS images to and from a server, or setting up access to EMR packages using VLAN’s that are in the dedicated 5Ghz frequency space.

Obviously this is done in order to provide both high QOS and higher bandwidth while allowing standard non mission critical data to flow over 2.4Ghz,

The main issue, in wireless network design, with many consumer devices such as the latest crop of Android and Apple OS products is that they cannot use the higher uncluttered frequencies as they do not have 5GHz wireless cards. This creates the possibility that a single Guest user can disrupt the flow of important, perhaps lifesaving data if these devices are used.

As  a summary, it is important to use mixed frequency enterprise class devices and sensible frequency isolation for critical data and allow generic and consumer type devices to have non-mission critical access to the network in a cohabitated way that does not cause issues. In many environments this can only be achieved by choosing devices that have both 2.4 and 5 GHz capabilities and allocating traffic according to priority within these frequencies.