Although the overall Trapeze system shares many characteristics with the systems from Airespace and Aruba, Trapeze leans heavily on RingMaster as a primary competitive differentiator, even referring to it as its "crown jewels." RingMaster is indeed the most sophisticated WLAN simulation and design tool we've seen--it lets you completely design a virtual system before you dispatch a single technician to the site and before a single AP is deployed.
Factors influencing the RF profile of your site, including doors, windows, walls and floors, are accounted for in the simulation. Although the simulation isn't 100 percent complete--RingMaster doesn't take into account in the effects of furniture and people, for example--it gets you a lot closer than if you'd guessed. And it generates detailed work orders for the installation of all system components, down to the precise location and MX port to which an AP should be attached. That can be a huge time-saver if you're contracting for installation.
The key question is: How much closer to ideal does RingMaster get you than a cruder RF planning system? Interestingly, Trapeze's proposed configuration for our 50,000-square-foot building, based on AutoCAD drawings we provided, was quite similar to those submitted by competitors, which argue that RingMaster has limitations. Given the vagaries of RF signal propagation and the difficulty in predicting user bandwidth needs in advance, it often makes more sense to deploy a dense configuration of APs and let the system sort out problems by adjusting power levels and channel assignments. We did get e-mail from one systems integrator, who touted the virtues of RingMaster and the value it's had for his business. Who do you suppose put him up to that?
Although Trapeze relies on RF modeling in RingMaster, it says it considers the RF environment too unpredictable to rely on dynamic RF adaptation for proper WLAN operation. Instead, with RingMaster, you gather operational information, develop a new model and then deploy it, presumably when nobody is on the system.
Once the MXs and MPs are deployed, the configuration created by RingMaster in the planning stage can be pushed out via the management system. What-ifs, such as increased user load or failed APs, can be explored within RingMaster to see how such factors would impact network performance without actually experiencing the proposed occurrence.
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