Wifi – MEC Networks Corporation

Ubiquiti UniFi UAP-AC-SHD Aces WiFi AP Test

MEC Networks Corporation — Thu, 13 Jun 2019 08:49:05 +0000

Periodically, we have a tendency to rent Alethea Communications to perform third-party testing for our Access purpose (AP) product. Alethea focuses on network stress testing services and products. They use varied take a look at strategies with simulated and real consumer devices. This test used real consumer devices during a realistic setting with up to one hundred devices. This technique offers terribly reliable knowledge for real-world performance.

Tested APs

This test at centered on high-end 4×4 APs with one pair of.4 Gc radio and one five GHz radio. The tested APs and their prices are summarized below.

Realistic Test Environment

Alethea used room surroundings for the check. They positioned the check AP within the center of the realm. All testing was done on the five GHz band and therefore the pair of.4 GHz radio was disabled. Alethea used the eighty MHz channel for single-client tests and the forty MHz channel for 32- and 100-client tests.

The nominal AP power level was +20 dBm. The checking team label average received AP amplitude at the shopper to a constant level, about -43 dBm, for all of the tested APs. AP power level settings were adjusted to equalize the variations.

Reasons for the calibration procedure:

APs have different antenna patterns. Some are focused more downward and others more toward the sides. In a single AP test like this, the AP with the greatest gain to the sides would have an advantage when there are many clients further away from the AP. In a high-density environment, a more downwards-focused pattern causes less interference to nearby APs. The more downwards-focused pattern provides better network-level capacity and is more suitable for high-density environments.
The principles for power level measurements and settings may vary between vendors.
Ruckus does not provide certain absolute dBm scale output power settings, only power level reduction values (dB) from the maximum.

The measured amplitude information shows that APs set to a similar power level had vital variations in power levels as measured by purchasers. This activity step was necessary to attain realistic and comparable leads to the targeted application.

Performance Scoring

Alethea used a five-grade scale for the overall scoring. The highest and lowest values of each test determined the full range, which they further divided into five equal sub-ranges. Depending on the test results, each AP got a score from 1 to 5 for each test.

Final Scores

According to test data, UAP-AC-SHD scored the highest overall, followed by Cisco 3802i. While this may be surprising for some readers, it’s not surprising for us. Performance is an important long-term focus area for our development teams.

In addition to the leading performance, UAP-AC-SHD provides exceptional value. The cost of performance is only 18-32% of a competitor’s equivalent.

I took this test data from Alethea’s raw data tables and created the summaries in this blog post. Alethea has also published comprehensive test reports. You can view the reports here. They contain a lot of interesting details and findings which go beyond the information presented in this blog post. For example, it is very interesting to observe the performance differences between client devices with different operating systems.

Ubiquiti offers a large variety of Wi-Fi access points for different use cases.

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Ubiquiti: When Will We Hit The Limits of Gigabit Ethernet with Wi-Fi?

MEC Networks Corporation — Fri, 03 May 2019 02:41:53 +0000

Since the coming of the Internet, various mechanical enhancements were important to encourage the speeds that clients have generally expected. From dial-up to DSL, from 802.11b to 802.11ac, to give some examples these progressions have improved Internet experience and availability. Thus Wi-Fi brought much-included accommodation over wired connections yet decreased speeds. To moderate these constraints, Wi-Fi innovation has advanced to build speeds, as have wired benchmarks (for instance, from 10/100 to Gigabit Ethernet).

Lately, Wi-Fi has moved toward the speed of Gigabit Ethernet. This is the standard utilized by most wired connections to send and get information. In this blog section, we’ll look at the speed of current wireless gadgets and how they contrast with Gigabit Ethernet.

Comparing Gigabit Ethernet to Wi-Fi

It’s important we look at Ethernet in the same way we do Wi-Fi to help us compare speeds. If Ethernet were marketed as a Wi-Fi device, it would advertise the following speeds:

Note from these results that Gigabit Ethernet is actually a 2-Gigabit aggregate and 10/100 Ethernet is a 200-Megabit aggregate.

How Wireless Measures Up

Now let’s look at how wireless compares. Here is some data from the fastest enterprise 4×4 MU-MIMO APs currently on the market under different client loads:

4×4 80 MHz 802.11ac MU-MIMO AP (nearly ideal conditions):

Note that with all wireless speeds cited – with little changed in the environment – these numbers will often be 50% of the advertised speeds.

Chipset manufacturers, Wi-Fi firmware engineers, etc. are proud of these numbers, as they are the real-world doubling of throughput from 3×3 802.11ac SU-MIMO:

3×3 80 MHz 11ac AP (nearly ideal conditions):

50 clients: ~100 Mbps

As you can see, 4×4 MU-MIMO doubles performance, from ~100 Mbps to 200 Mbps aggregate TCP throughput.

Let’s summarize:

When Do Gigabit Ethernet Start Limiting Wireless Speeds?

While there have been a number of quicker alternatives to Gigabit Ethernet for many years (for example, 10-Gigabit, 25-Gigabit, etc.), these technologies have not yet been adopted on a wide scale. Understanding the data shown above leads us to consider the question, when will alternative multi-Gigabit Ethernet technologies really matter for the enterprise network?

Let’s look at some data:

So the answer to our question is:

Somewhere around two to three 4×4 MU-MIMO 80 MHz radios (plus a 2.4 GHz radio), depending on the ratio of downstream/upstream traffic.

So as you can see, Gigabit Ethernet does not limit the speeds of enterprise deployment APs that have a single 4×4 802.11ac MU-MIMO radio and a single 4×4 2.4 GHz radio.

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Ruckus: Shaping the Future of Tomorrow’s Networks

MEC Networks Corporation — Thu, 04 Apr 2019 13:55:20 +0000

On April 4, 2019, CommScope took the bold step of creating an end-to-end networking innovator. From smart homes to intelligent cities – and everywhere in between – CommScope now has today’s most important technology and the inside track on tomorrow’s most meaningful innovations.

Ruckus sat down with CommScope CEO Eddie Edwards and COO Bruce McClelland to talk about what drove the combination with ARRIS International, the most important challenges the industry will tackle in 2019, and what to expect as an even stronger CommScope shapes the networks of the future.

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