What items can we take care of from a wireless design and infrastructure point of view when it comes to our wired network? Well, there are a couple of things we can do to enhance the security and performance of the network. First, since almost all customers are now using multiple SSIDs and VLANs, then we should take the management VLAN (i.e. the IP address of the physical AP) and setup some ACLs that allow only the datacenter and administrators ability to access the AP.

Next, make sure that you don’t have too many users on each VLAN. Remember, until you move to 802.11n, the amount of broadcast traffic can be a much higher percentage of overall traffic than what we are used to on the Ethernet side of the network. Lastly, in most thin AP environments, keep in mind that all the wireless data is tunneled back to the controller(s). This dictates that we engineer enough backhaul bandwidth between our IDFs, MDFs, and datacenters to handle all this ‘tunneled’ data without impacting the rest of the wired network.