Enterprise Wireless LAN Competitive Testing
Performance Results of Industry's Top Seven 802.11g Wireless LAN Systems for Mid-Sized Enterprises
Executive Summary
Jones-Petrick and Associates (JPA) recently conducted a technical evaluation for Ruckus Wireless of the latest generation of enterprise wireless LAN (WLAN) controllers and access points in a real world office environment.
While the industry has converged on a centralized WLAN model to deploy, manage and secure Wi-Fi® networks within large corporations, innovations have mostly focused on the security and manageability aspects of the WLAN residing on intelligent WLAN controllers. Little has been done to solve the fundamental issue of sustaining wireless connectivity and performance in the face of interference, increasing distance and obstructions.
As Wi-Fi becomes more prevalent and WLAN controller technologies mature, the focus is now on fixing the neglected RF component.
Charts
The biggest complaints about WLANs today are no longer about management or security – rather, they center around RF problems that manifest weak Wi-Fi coverage, unstable signals and performance fluctuations. Without the ability to maintain reliable wireless connections and predictable performance, even the best WLAN security and management system is moot.
We found the test results to be impressive. The testing revealed that WLAN systems that focused only on security and management and lacking RF optimizations were unable to provide consistent performance levels across all locations.
Conversely, systems that implement comprehensive RF optimizations demonstrated markedly better overall performance across all the test cases. The RF-optimized WLAN systems were also better able to adapt to real-time changes in the wireless environment such as interference, and were able to deliver ubiquitous Wi-Fi coverage with consistent performance.
In all cases, as the distance between the Wi-Fi client and AP increased, performance decreased, some drastically. This was exacerbated by interference. Only the Ruckus Wireless ZoneFlex Smart WLAN system was able to provide reasonably consistent performance across all locations, even under interference for voice, data and mixed traffic. Ruckus attributes this to technical advances with their smart antenna technology embedded in its ZoneFlex WLAN system.
The Ruckus ZoneFlex system ranked at or near the top in all the JPA tests. While the Ruckus ZoneFlex performance was on par with all other systems in short range tests, at the hardest-to-reach locations, the Ruckus ZoneFlex system delivered five times the throughput over the worst performing system and twice the throughput of its nearest competitor. It also delivered the highest voice quality measured by Mean Opinion Score (MOS) and exhibited the lowest average jitter across all test locations.
In the most difficult test, the Ruckus ZoneFlex system delivered an aggregate TCP downstream throughput of 15.7 mbps to 20 Centrino clients at a distance of over 150 feet, through five walls. The nearest competitive vendor delivered 7 mbps (see Chart 1) in the same test.
While most systems fared well at short distances, consistent performance across the coverage area and the ability to adapt to the environment variables in real time are what interest enterprise users the most.
Note that to remain completely independent, JPA worked with all vendors being tested to ensure technical accuracy.
