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Cisco Vs. Meru: The Vendors Speak

Posted by Art Wittmann on November 22, 2006

Information technology is complicated. It's a simple fact you deal with every day, just as we do in our labs, and vendors do in creating their products. When Network Computing sets out to compare products, we understand the task isn't trivial and, for the vendors involved, the stakes are high. If products do poorly in our tests, we know and the vendors know they'll spend the year explaining the results to their customers. The stakes are high for us, too. If we ask the wrong questions or report misleading or incorrect test results, we'll lose your trust--and that's Network Computing's most valuable asset.

When we invited Cisco Systems and Meru Networks to a head-to-head shoot-out of WLAN gear, we knew the results would be contentious. We knew Meru claims superior performance and a novel approach. We also knew it's rare for Meru to participate in such tests, so we were eager to get it right.

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The Cisco | Meru Chronicles Read the Review: • Wireless Network Head-to-Head: Cisco Vs. Meru Download the Results Spreadsheets: • Download Cisco Results Capacity • Download Meru Results Capacity

For every review we perform, planning starts months before the issue date. We invite the vendors and share our test plan. We then create the test bed and the vendors ship us their products. We welcome the participants to our labs, so that vendor reps can educate us about the products and verify that we've set them up correctly. The reps can even tune their products' performance in our environment. Once everyone is satisfied with the test environment, the participants leave and we perform the tests.

Once the tests are complete, we share our results with the vendors and ask them to explain any unusual results. In this case, Cisco explained those results in part as resulting from standards violations by the Meru gear. As our authors worked to verify these claims and to understand how each vendor's product does what it does, the story became less about the results and more about the difficulty we had in arriving at a reasonable explanation for the results.