Wi-Fi Stress Testing Shows Breaking Points for Top Enterprise Access Points

By Anamika Singh
TMCnet Contributor

Ruckus Wireless, Inc., a supplier of advanced wireless systems for the mobile Internet infrastructure market, announced its new ZoneFlex 7982 Smart Wi-Fi access point (AP). It was appreciated in a non-vendor sponsored, enterprise Wi-Fi stress test study performed and published by Wireless LAN Professionals, Inc., (WLAN Pros) based in Orem, Utah.

Unlike other Wi-Fi performance tests, WLAN Pros find out how much traffic was needed to "break" access points from nine enterprise suppliers like Aruba Networks (News - Alert), Aerohive, Cisco, HP, Juniper, Meraki, and Ruckus Wireless.

For enterprises and carriers requiring increased wireless performance, capacity, unparalleled ease of use and greater business value, within high-density environments, ZoneFlex 7982 is reliable performing product. The ZoneFlex 7982 delivers consistent performance and maintains stable connections within high-capacity environments and to smart mobile devices that constantly change their location and orientation.

The simple variation of a device's orientation can account for up to a five times performance degradation among Wi-Fi products unable to adapt to such changes. To address these challenges, the ZoneFlex 7982 uses a three-stream 802.11n access point to combine dynamic polarization diversity with adaptive antenna arrays and transmit beamforming to give customers up to a 4x improvement in Wi-Fi performance, signal gain and reception.

"With so many new Wi-Fi devices with which to contend, organizations are now demanding a well-performing wireless network and are, at times, confused and misled by vendor claims," stated Keith Parsons (News - Alert), a certified network engineer and managing director of Wireless LAN Professionals.

"Our ultimate goal was to keep everything constant and the tests repeatable by only changing the access point. This way we could determine the edge at which these 'best in class' access points fall over," Parsons adds.

Parsons emphasized that for this wireless testing, no donations, gifts or money were accepted from any vendor. All participating vendors were encouraged to and many did actively participate in the testing of their products.

"To make the test as vendor independent as we could, we adapted the testing to ensure no single vendor had any advantage," further says Parsons. "For instance, we moved the test AP location to not be centered over iPads so Ruckus adaptive antennas and interference rejection wouldn't give them an unfair advantage."

The testing was performed at a Canyons School District facility and involved stressing Wi-Fi access points by running high-definition unicast IP-based video streams to Apple (News - Alert) iPads and transferring a 600MB file (up and down) and performing a 20 second iPerf TCP test to an Apple MacBook Pro over the same access point under test. WLAN Pros chose 20MHz wide channels, to work within a smaller RF spectrum.

The Ruckus ZoneFlex 7982 incorporates adaptive antenna arrays for up to four times extended range and coverage, and automatic interference mitigation optimized for high-density environments.

The ZoneFlex 7982 is the only three-radio, three-stream, dual-band 802.11n access point to combine dynamic polarization diversity with adaptive antenna arrays that provides improvements in Wi-Fi performance, signal gain and reception.

Edited by Brooke Neuman