Toyota Motor Sales, Torrance, Calif., has been testing the two-radio 1140 since last summer, and plans to deploy it company-wide, eventually replacing some 2,900 existing Cisco 802.11abg devices. These are located in the corporate offices, regional sales offices and warehouses, used daily by about 3,000 devices, 80% of them wireless scanners and most of the rest laptops. At the start of January, Toyota switched off support for 11b clients, since most existing clients are now capable of 54Mbps 11g or 11a performance.

Toyota has a few 1250 11n models deployed, but these need power injectors for extra juice, and are festooned with big, external wand antennas, says Erik[STET Erik] Parker, senior wireless infrastructure analyst with the company's wireless design and engineering department. The 1140 works fine with the existing Cisco PoE switches and Catalyst 6500 modules, he says.

The improved signal strength with the new 1140 means that Toyota can increase the radius of their WLAN cells (the area around each access point) from 35 to 50 feet. "That's pretty significant," Parker says. Initially, the company will have 11n users operating in the 5GHz band, where channels can be combined to give the full 11n performance. "We still have a decent amount of cell overlap for capacity reasons," he says. "For instance, training rooms that will hold more than 15 people will generally have two cells overlap that area."

Parker's initial, though limited, testing with the 1140 does show some performance gain for the 11g clients, but nothing dramatic so far. "Normally, we'd see 2.2Mbps over 11g," he says. "We're now seeing a couple of hundred kilobits over that with beamforming."

Performance for 11n clients was remarkable, consistently and easily topping 110Mbps with 40MHz channels. "It was a pleasant surprise to see it work [fully] on PoE, and to show my colleague that my throughput on a 40MHz channel is higher than his on a 10/100 Ethernet card," Parker says.