I had the pleasure to record a podcast with Ray Sliteris of Intel to discuss how they manage their internal wireless LAN on a global basis. Managing over 6,000 access points and controllers is a pretty huge task for any corporation; these guys have the added benefit of working for a company that is a main driver behind the entire WiFi industry.

A few interesting items that particularly caught my attention:

1. Last year they were almost 100% autonomous access points and now they are about 25% converted to a controller based approach. This migration will take them several years to move entirely to a thin AP model. My guess is most organizations are like this, they would very much like to take advantage of the “latest and greatest” but due to organizational inertia and network size it takes a while to make any radical changes.

2. The biggest challenges they faced in deploying a network of this size were creating consistent configurations and having a global network view.

3. 802.11n is not a big push for them. They are testing this new technology out in a few areas but they see this as a 2009 production deployment type of technology. The big business drivier for Intel will not necessarily be the additional throughput but rather the improved connection reliability inherent with MIMO.

Please take a listen to the podcast and let me know what you think!