What's your opinion on running 80mhz channelization for 5ghz?

That's because we can step down from 80 to accomodate 40MHz/20MHz channelization on less capable clients.  Auto setting is 80MHz (maximum).

Well I think it's hard / misleading to sell a 802.11ac AP and have the default configuration be half (or less) of the advertised bandwidth/speed numbers!

80MHz cuts the number of nonoverlapping 5GHz channels down to 6 (assuming you are in the US and are allowed to use all the DFS channels), which is still a lot, but is probably not good use of the spectrum for extremely high density deployments.

FWIW unless you're running like a stadium or concert where you legitimately need that many AP's in the same area to service clients packed closely together, then 20 or 40MHz channels are probably more appropriate.

But I'm right now in an office environment where the IT dept chose 20MHz AC channels because they have a ton of (Cisco) AP's in the hallways and wanted to avoid overlapping channels, except the density of AP's is actually for coverage area, not for high # of clients. Sniffing the air waves almost every 5GHz channel is unused and I put a Ruckus R700 on a 80MHz channel that's "overlapping" 4 of their AP's, and I can consistently achieve 450mbit up and down while against the 20MHz Cisco network I struggle to pull 90mbit.


It all depends on how many clients you expect to serve, and what's more important —increasing the # of clients you can service, or delivering extreme speeds to the clients you have.


Channelfly in theory should help out a lot if neighboring AP's are sharing or overlapping 80MHz channels and one suddenly becomes busy. Channelfly will recognize the sudden loss of capacity and hop to a more available channel.

gotcha :)

One a side note, what's better for a high density office environment background scanning or channelfly?

On 5GHz especially with newer firmware like ZD 9.13, Channelfly is the clear winner. You may want to mess with the MTBC setting (I've had good luck with 200-300 minutes resulting in just one or two channel hops per day)

On 2.4GHz my feelings are really mixed. Quite honestly, the safest option has been "neither". There's some horrible devices out there, particularly internet-of-things (smart thermostats, robotic vacuums, fancy light bulbs, etc) that are 2.4GHZ-only and handle channel switches really badly. Since most clients that care about performance will likely roam to 5GHz given good coverage, I've resigned myself to manual channel selection on 2.4 even though it's not optimal.