Five degrees might not sound like much when you look at the weather forecast. But for the networks our everyday lives depend on, it can mean the difference between equipment running reliably and being pushed past the limits it was built for.
That matters more every year as extreme heat becomes more common. Heatwaves, wildfires, severe storms, and prolonged periods of high temperatures are putting IT infrastructure under pressure in places that were never designed for these conditions.
At the same time, the hardware inside our networks is becoming more powerful and densely packed, making it even harder to keep cool.
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Director of Wireless Product Management at Extreme Networks.
Traditionally, outdoor wireless equipment has been designed to operate at temperatures of up to 60°C, taking into account both the heat outside the equipment and the heat generated by the hardware itself. But some vendors are now lowering that ceiling to around 55°C.
As temperatures rise and access points generate more heat of their own, that five-degree difference could be critical.
Our networks are getting hotter
The pressure is building as wireless technology evolves. Access points, for example, have gone from housing two radios to three or four, and each extra radio adds more heat that has to be dissipated. As a result, vendors are having to think carefully about how they balance heat and power as they pack in more performance benefits.
Wi-Fi 8 could also raise the stakes even further. Future wireless platforms are expected to incorporate more AI-assisted processing at the edge, increasing demand for compute resources, memory and power. But that extra processing power and memory will also need more power and will generate more heat, creating another challenge for vendors trying to keep their equipment reliable in demanding environments.
Solar load is an increasingly critical factor too. Direct solar exposure can raise equipment temperatures well beyond ambient conditions, making solar load a critical factor in outdoor network design. It’s important to consider both how hot the air around the equipment is becoming and how much additional heat the hardware is absorbing from the sun. Together, this extra heat can push already hot equipment much closer to its limits.
There is a cost to resilience
Designing hardware to operate reliably across a wider temperature range is more complicated than it might seem. Temperatures are rising and are becoming more unpredictable, and the conditions outdoor access points face today could look very different in just a few years.
Every component has its own operating limits, so each part needs to be selected based on the temperatures it’s expected to encounter. However, building access points capable of operating at temperatures closer to 70°C might need industrial or automotive-grade parts. These can be significantly more expensive and aren’t always as widely available globally, creating their own supply chain challenges.
Cooling increasingly powerful access points brings its own trade-offs, too. Fans help dissipate heat, but they add more moving parts and another potential point of failure. Larger heat sinks and liquid cooling can be helpful alternatives, but they also make the equipment bigger, heavier, and more expensive.
At the same time, customers want more powerful and capable equipment at competitive prices. For vendors, however, building more powerful outdoor access points that can withstand higher temperatures increases hardware cost and complexity.
Lowering the maximum operating temperature can therefore help keep costs down. But that five-degree reduction matters, since it can limit the countries, climates and outdoor environments where an access point can be reliably deployed.
Is your network ready for the heat?
As extreme weather becomes more common, organizations need to think carefully about the conditions their network infrastructure may need to operate in over the coming years. That means looking beyond day-one performance specifications and considering how equipment will cope under sustained heat, solar load and other environmental stresses throughout its expected lifespan.
The concern isn’t that an access point will suddenly fail the moment temperatures rise. However, as equipment becomes more powerful and densely packed, thermal management becomes an increasingly important part of maintaining reliable performance over the long term. Designing hardware to operate reliably in demanding conditions can help protect performance, reliability and the lifespan of the investment.
For networking vendors, that means balancing power, performance, cost and thermal design, while ensuring equipment is appropriately designed and tested for the environments in which it will be deployed. For organizations investing in their networks, it means taking a more forward-looking approach and considering not just the conditions equipment faces today, but what it may need to withstand several years from now.
That starts with asking the right questions before deployment. How much environmental headroom does the equipment have? What conditions has it genuinely been designed and tested to withstand? How does it perform under solar load and other real-world stresses? And will that resilience continue to support the network throughout its expected lifespan?
The goal is to build networks for the future, with the resilience to keep performing as both technology and the environment around them change.
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