R710 coverage and features

The r710 also has upwards of 4000 antenna array patterns to that of the r700 which has upwards of 3000.

Note: The only coverage benefit is on the uplink as the downlink is maintained by EIRP.

Apart form the what John has already said the only additional benefit would be performance within the coverage area due to the r710 having more antenna, more spatial streams, and higher bitrate capability.

Many of the clients you mentioned here are 2x2:2 and 1x1:1, which would source little benefit from the move from a 3x3:3 to a 4x4:4 AP. Definitely the R710 could be a slightly better option, but I would at the same time temper the expectations for dramatic improvement.

Definitely with a 200+ concurrent user scenario on 40MHz channels, you've got a high density high bandwidth requirement setup. Adding more AP's is probably the better way to go for now. When Ruckus adds Airtime Fairness to 802.11ac, that might help.

You say the following:

oh and we have 45mpbs+30mbps = 75mbps WAN line which are club together

Are these WAN links load balanced?

If you were to do the math on your WAN, and look at your backhaul in relationship to you concurrent user volume. If all your clients were on at once they would share the WAN and be able to pass 357Kbps each - this is not a lot.

Network design always starts at application demand and the number of clients which demand the use of that application and the value associated to that application.

Example:

Lets say your application is 4Mbps

Your client count is 210 with a client radio split of 65% - meaning your busiest frequency would have 137 clients on it.

Lets also say your Max TCP throughput of the AP radio (802.11ac using a 40MHz Channel and a single spatial stream) is 70Mbps on the DL.

Your cell edge deisgn is -61dBm (based on IEEE values for 64QAM bitrate)

The airtime required for a 4Mbps constant stream would be as follows:

1x1 Client = 5.93% @ Top Bitrate

If you then look at your client limit of 137 the total airtime to pass the demand for the application at once would be 811.85%.

Your happy airtime is 75%.

This would mean that you need 11 AP's to deliver the application to client numbers.

You would also need a backhaul of 840Mbps.

As you can RF is one thing, but you have to base your RF on what your network demand is first.

Hi Sean both the WAN line are active at the same 1:1 and based on rrd graph concurrent usage on 45 Mbps line is around 15Mpbs and on the 30Mbps line it is around 10Mbps .... for the past 6 months (enabling proxy really helps).
And previously while we are on 5GHz 80 MHz .... downloading apple update of size 2Gigs take around 2 minutes... but i haven't test it since we enable 5GHz 40MHz ... so regarding the WAN pipe i believe it is ok for now ....

What is the areas in which you are deploying these AP's as the airtime impact you are mentioning points to this being an open space... am I correct?

800square feet office building... and the APs are kinda close to each other less then 30 feet....

Unless you have MU-MIMO capable clients, MU-MIMO won't do you any good. Furthermore, I think you might be misquoting the "8x better signal coverage" spec -- that is likely compared to a competitor AP, not to an R700. Almost none of your clients mentioned are 802.11ac Wave 2 MU-MIMO capable (except maybe some Android phones -- the Nexus 6P/5X come to mind).

A R710 might be able to deliver marginally better data rates than an R700 to your clients, but it is not going to be a dramatic capacity/throughput improvement unless you have MU-MIMO capable clients, 4x4:4 clients, etc. More AP's is the way to go, though it's still not clear to me what in particular is wrong with "airtime" (utilization?)

How many clients do you have per AP, what is the average throughput, and what do the airtime utilization stats look like on 5GHz?

Again, I don't want to discourage you from getting R710's. I love my R710 and it's no doubt measurably superior to the R700 and R600 I have. However, I think your expectations of the difference between R710 vs R700 might be too high, and you are likely to find that the R710 does not magically solve your problems.

Most of the ways that R710 improves performance and capacity by a huge amount is via MU-MIMO. To a lesser extent, its additional antenna elements and chip-based TxBF can deliver a stronger signal to a client at a further distance, and its superior receive sensitivity can deal with weak transmitting clients from a further distance.

But if you are running into capacity issues with your deployment in your small area, it sounds like your solutions are more going to involve Channelfly, bss-minrate, possibly allowing AP's to reduce power automatically so that you can pack more AP's into your environment, switching to 20MHz channels to add more non-interfering AP's, etc. Those techniques are more likely to make a significant performance improvement.

When dealing with non wave 2 clients, the R700, R710, and R600 are all essentially using the same underlying wifi technology. One is not going to be a gigantic (e.g. 2x 3x 4x) performance improvement over the other.  That's rarely even the case when comparing 2x2:2 with 3x3:3 AP's (e.g. R500 vs R700).

Sure thing! 5%, 10% or even 12% airtime utilization is not that bad. Any particular reason why you'd like to keep it to 5? It sounds like you have plenty of capacity left on your network. Is something not meeting a performance goal you have from the clients' perspective?

You should not be worried about airtime utilisation until it is above 75%

That's pretty good and about the capabilities of the technology.

Your WAN is only 75Mbps so this will not affect internet traffic.

What is your Extranet demands?

Sounds like you are doing everything correctly. It is totally normal to get an increase in airtime utilization on 5GHz when cutting the channel width in half to 40MHz. Now, 802.11ac clients may take up to twice as long to transmit the same data on a 40MHz channel as on an 80MHz channel.

Of course, you are doing this for a good reason -- you want to deploy more APs to increase capacity. 40MHz is a great setting for that.

I would definitely not recommend reducing the number of AP's. In the future, you might need/want more AP's if your number of clients or bandwidth requirements grow. Or maybe one day you'll find that a good percentage of your clients support Wave 2 and hence your whole network will benefit from MU-MIMO. That might be a good reason to introduce R710's in your denser areas.

Until then, I think you are well provisioned. I wish I could have your kind of utilization! Due to periodic machine backups on my network, my 5GHz utilization peaks at around 30-50%. But even during that kind of heavy usage, my clients still perform great, and there's no noticeable loss in performance.

It's great that you over provision your network and have invested in the best wifi solution on the market. I'm sure your users appreciate it, even if they don't know how much worse their wifi could be!