Video conferencing has become the business hero during lockdown, enabling many businesses to stay in touch with their work-from-home employees, suppliers and customers, but real-time video traffic can quickly amplify the cracks in ageing network infrastructure.

Prior to COVID-19, existing, older generation business Wi-Fi networks would have been more than enough to connect employees to ERP systems, file share drives and e-mail applications. Now with the new added network pressure of concurrent real-time video conferencing streams between branches, boardrooms and work-from-home employees, the demands are exceeding the capacity and upgrading your office Wi-Fi has become a business imperative.

To increase the capacity of business Wi-Fi networks, the time has come to move on from the previous generation 802.11n, or Wi-Fi 4 technology, to 802.11ac Wave 2, more commonly known as Wi-Fi 5, which can serve both 2.4GHz and 5GHz devices concurrently. Being able to serve both frequencies at once holds a lot of benefits such as an increased number of simultaneous connections, redundancy and balancing the number of connections between frequencies.

Wi-Fi 5 Wave 2 also supports multi-user multiple input, multiple output (MU-MIMO) which allows for up to four spatial streams. MU-MIMO goes a long way to deliver a smoother, faster, higher-capacity user experience, perfect for streaming real-time video from multiple devices throughout the office simultaneously, something Wi-Fi 4 was never designed for.

MU-MIMO also opens the door to gigabit wireless networking. The data throughput rate is much higher on Wi-Fi 5 Wave 2 networks and can deliver speeds of more than 2Gbps, compared to the 300Mbps maximum throughput of the previous generation Wi-Fi 4 networks.

MiRO has multiple Wi-Fi 5 Wave 2 solutions to help you with your Wi-Fi upgrade, all of which offer reliable, secure connectivity for exceptional video conferencing quality. The MiRO office Wi-Fi range includes Cambium Networks’ cnPilot cloud-based enterprise offering, Ubiquiti’s extensive UniFi range, and the Grandstream budget-friendly GWN series.

Cambium creates true enterprise-grade, high-performance, scalable networking solutions through its cnPilot Wi-Fi and cnMatrix switching range. These solutions are ideal for a variety of applications ranging from large enterprise Wi-Fi networks through to small business Wi-Fi. The Cambium cnMeastro cloud-based management platform allows easy, central management of large networks with full visibility over the entire network.

Ubiquiti’s UniFi is an extensive range of end-to-end, SME and home Wi-Fi solutions. The UniFi suite of products are configured and managed through their fool proof software-defined network (SDN) platform to manage all UniFi Wi-Fi, UniFi network security, UniFi surveillance and UniFi networking devices.

Last, but not least, the Grandstream GWN series of networking solutions offer cost-effective secure connectivity, with great coverage. Grandstream’s powerful Wi-Fi Access Points offer fast and easy provisioning and management thanks to a built-in controller and their VPN router allows for secure remote connectivity for work-from-home employees.

Contact a MiRO expert to find the perfect upgrade for your business and you will discover that you are spoilt for choice!