Ruckus Wireless announced that its ZoneFlex midrange
Smart Wi-Fi system performed up to 10 times faster.
The speed is better than higher end competitive wireless
products from Cisco, Aruba, HP and others. This is the industry’s first
independent Wi-Fi interference and capacity tests released by Tom’s Hardware,
one of the Internet’s premiere resources for unbiased reviews, news and
information on technology.
According to Tom’s Hardware,
the wireless LAN testing was developed to determine how advanced Wi-Fi
capabilities affect real-world wireless performance at different distances and
within high-density environments when wireless interference is introduced.
In nearly every Wi-Fi
test, Ruckus delivered demonstrably faster and more consistent performance over
competitive products. Ruckus did not pay for the Tom’s Hardware testing or
influence the results.
“Given the insane number of wireless-only smart
phones, tablets and laptops hitting networks today, our readers must now deal
with new Wi-Fi issues such as interference and higher client capacities,”
said Chris Angelini, worldwide editor-in-chief, Tom’s Hardware.
“We were unable to find any definitive or
comprehensive testing in this area, so we decided to give readers a first-hand
view of how the best Wi-Fi products we could find would actually perform in a
real world environment when lots of users try to connect and interference is
present. We knew this would be a difficult to get done but, after months of
work, we were able to build a reliable test bed that let us clearly determine
if advanced Wi-Fi capabilities really have an impact on performance. They
do,” Angelini added.
The Tom’s Hardware Wi-Fi testing is the first exhaustive
industry evaluation of the impact of RF interference and high client capacities
on new leading 802.11n products.
“The RF spectrum within the unlicensed band is
becoming increasingly noisy and crowded,” said Steve Martin, vice
president of engineering, Ruckus Wireless.
“These types of tests are extremely useful to
enterprises that often don’t have the time or resources to properly test Wi-Fi
systems and every new capability introduced. Tom’s testing clearly demonstrates
how important RF optimizations are to the performance and reliability of Wi-Fi
– an area where few vendors have focused attention but where the greatest gains
are achieved. These results substantiate this,” Martin added.
Because many enterprises cannot perform comprehensive
wireless testing, they are forced to compare Wi-Fi systems at close range under
ideal conditions that don’t typically reflect the challenging environments
within which the products will actually be used.
Subsequently, after spending time and money deploying
Wi-Fi, they find little difference between wireless products and after
deployment begin to see performance and coverage problems that become difficult
and costly to repair.
Tom’s Hardware focused on two Wi-Fi test types:
single-client and multi-client performance. To mimic the typical Wi-Fi
experience, Tom’s Hardware measured TCP uplink and downlink performance of a
single, dual-band (three stream capable) Centrino-based 802.11n laptop
operating in the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz spectrums.
The Wi-Fi testing was performed at 10, 70 and 100 feet in
clear line-of-sight and non-line-of-site channel conditions with and without RF
interference present.
Non-802.11 interference in the 2.4 GHz band was generated
using an interference generator. In the 5 GHz band, 802.11n co-channel
interference was introduced using 60 laptops contending for access to the same
channel as the device under test.
Tom’s Hardware testing was conducted in 20,000 square
feet of office space surrounded by glass, metal, drywall and numerous
obstacles.
Tom’s multi-client testing included measuring the
aggregate throughput of leading Wi-Fi systems when 60 high-performance laptops
simultaneously streamed volumes of data, as well as each system’s
implementation of airtime fairness, when these laptops were used in combination
with iPad tablets.
By Telecomlead.com Team
editor@telecomlead.com
