Wireless Water Cooler

I was reading a blog yesterday about airtime utilization and the author mentioned that devices are still shipped with legacy rates enabled.

The blog was an excellent well put together piece but the thing I focused on was devices shipping with legacy rates enabled. Being that we are dealing with 802.11ac now I see no reason that we should be dealing with these legacy rates. I realize there are still some devices remaining in production that will require the rates. I think it would be easier to have to manually enable them for the small number of networks that will need them. As opposed to discovering the problem via troubleshooting. Now I think most networks are now trending to newer technology (at least .11n). I have personally never run across anything beyond 802.11 g but I have not been at this for too long.

Going off of my personal experience with devices and networks, the use of these rates will do nothing but run the utilization up. Maybe this is incorrect logic but why do vendors till ship with legacy rates enabled?

That is because most of the client devices that do not support "cutting" rates are legacy, but critical devices like barcode scanners and would disable an entire warehouse if deployed.  

Cutting rates is normally done to reduce utilization and improve roaming, but is normally done in high density environments.  There is nothing that says most deployments need assistance with roaming OR are high density environments, so the most compatible default is enabling all the default rates.  The admin is free to tune after initial deployment.

Thanks Colin.

Misuse of words on my part. When stating legacy I was meaning 802.11 or 802.11b the original technology but you are correct .11n is now legacy. 

I was under the impression that majority of devices had moved past fhss or dsss, atleast in my expirence. And thinking that a those rates have been around for 17 years leads me to think that the devices are giving in to new tech.

Jamie E,

Not saying 802.11n is legacy...  I am just using "legacy" as slang for "older devices".

The majority of all newer devices have moved past the older standards, but there are quite a few industries like retail that still have huge deployments of older devices that still require support.

If you want LEGACY (as opposed to merely legacy) I've got a heap of 2.4-spread spectrum gear we're just starting to retire now.

Next we'll start retiring the 802.11b stuff, but don't hold your breath!