We won't say this review was without hiccups--in fact, we experienced two show-stopping issues in the beginning of our evaluation period, involving how Cisco's 1250 handled an older Intel 2915 a/b/g WLAN client in high-traffic and abrupt-disconnection situations. But a few glitches are to be expected when testing prerelease software, and Cisco responded quickly. After receiving updated controller code, we had no problems; an official version of that code train was released as 4.2.99.0.
We benchmarked the Cisco 1250 AP against Cisco's 1240AG device using Ixia's Chariot High Performance script in both open air and Azimuth Systems' Adept-n isolated environment. We used a Cisco 4402 controller and found the 1250 AP as easy to configure as any Cisco LWAPP access point. Our WLAN clients included a Lenovo T61 with an internal Intel 4965AGN chipset and an IBM T43 featuring Intel's 2915ABG silicon.
The Cisco 1250's maximum TCP Layer performance was 154.9 Mbps using a 40-MHz channel in the 5-GHz band--more than six times the performance of our 11a baseline of 22.8 Mbps. For a smaller 20-MHz channel size, performance was 84.8 Mbps and 96.7 Mbps for 5 GHz and 2.4 GHz, respectively; even after spectrum analysis of our testing site, we can't explain why 2.4 GHz is faster. That anomaly aside, Cisco's 1250 provided performance three to four times greater than peak 802.11a/g throughput.
We also ran peak assessments with AES encryption enabled and found that Cisco delivered line-rate performance in all but 40-MHz channel sizes, where throughput dipped to 144.5 Mbps, about a 7% loss. Cisco told us that optimizing its hardware encryption engine is a goal of the latest software release, and we expect this gap to narrow. We also measured coexistence performance when both an 11n and an 11a/g client were associated to the same radio on the 1250. With both clients, overall cell throughput dropped to 60 Mbps, with an 80% to 20% speed split at 5 GHz and a 90% to 10% split for 2.4 GHz.
We performed additional mobile rate vs. range testing inside a 50,000-square-foot warehouse, with cinder block and Sheetrock walls. We selected this location for its RF isolation and lack of a production WLAN. Then we upped the ante with a rotating Sherline Products digitally controlled turntable, which introduced movement in the client notebook's antenna orientation and systematically varied multipath conditions. We kept rotation speed at 1 RPM. After enabling AES encryption, we again used Chariot for traffic generation with bidirectional TCP pairs to assess overall performance with strong security; we took multiple test runs and averaged the results at distances of 15, 75, 80, and 130 feet. Across the entire location set, 802.11n's performance was four times better than 802.11g and better than 802.11a by three times and five times for 20-MHz and 40-MHz channel sizes, respectively.
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