3. VOICE AND DATA: Meru supported predictable, enterprise-grade voice with data; Cisco did not. With a Cisco AP, uplink data traffic can displace the uplink voice traffic, breaking the end-to-end call experience. With a Meru AP, enterprise-grade voice and data are supported simultaneously, without impact. The industry standard for enterprise-grade voice quality is a MOS (Mean Opinion Score) of 4.0. Meru provided a minimum quality of 4.145 with data while Cisco provided 3.72. Under higher data loads, the difference becomes even greater.
4. PROPER AIRTIME SHARING: Meru is a proven good neighbor. A single Meru AP in 802.11b/g mode provides 16 Mbps of throughput; a single Cisco AP in 802.11b/g mode provides 11.3 Mbps of throughput. In the test, when the Cisco and Meru APs were collocated, the Meru AP provided 8 Mbps of throughput, whereas the Cisco AP provided 2.75 Mbps. In a shared network, Meru used 50 percent of the airtime and got 50 percent of the throughput it would have in an isolated network--which is expected good neighbor behavior. Cisco provided an apparently buggy product that broke down, and chose to blame Meru instead of acknowledging a product bug that affected its airtime efficiency. It should be known that this is a test the Wi-Fi Alliance specifically ran for our products, using a wide variety of industry APs, and we passed its tests easily.
In all the performance tests, Meru tied with or surpassed Cisco. Based on these tests, we believe any enterprise seeking to deploy a wireless LAN would unequivocally find Meru the vendor of choice. While the article focused on unfounded allegations from a competitor, the bake-off results are incontrovertible, and in the final analysis, that should be the only thing that matters to the readers. Meru trounced Cisco in the head-to-head tests. End of story.
Dr. Vaduvur Bharghavan is chief technology officer and founder of Meru Networks. Dr. Bharghavan's achievements include contributions to the development of wireless medium access protocols and quality of service architectures.
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