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.
