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.
Although Meru strongly rejects any claims that it violates IEEE 802.11 standards, it also will only go so far in explaining how its products work. Since Meru so strongly disagrees with our conclusions about what we saw in the lab, yet wouldn't tell us how it's done, we've given each company the chance to state its case here. Is Meru playing fast and loose with the standards, or is Cisco making claims to deflect shortcomings in its own products? That's now for you to decide. What we can say is that if you plan to use Cisco and Meru WLAN products in close proximity, you'd better do your own testing before you sign on the dotted line. --Art Wittmann
Cisco Response
Suppose you were lucky enough to have a device that lets you act like a fire truck and flip traffic lights in your favor as you drive through town in the middle of rush hour. You would get to your destination faster, but, alas, everyone else would get stuck in miserable traffic--good for you, but bad for everybody else.
Industry standards are like the traffic lights and rules of the road for the complex, interconnected world of networked computing. They set a baseline for what vendors implement so that IT customers get the benefits of market competition and of sharing an IP medium, while assuring end users of vendor interoperability. When vendors ignore industry standards in a harmful way, the general, networked IT world suffers.
Verizon is demoing crowd analytics technology that uses 5G along with AI and mobile edge computing to give stadium operators insights into the flow of fans throughout a venue.
As we move closer to fully realizing the potential of Wi-Fi 7, it becomes evident that the RF, signaling, and throughput tests are not merely procedural checkpoints but the pillars of excellence in wireless communication.
With low earth orbit (LEO) satellites fast becoming the norm and 3GPP unifying telecom standards around the globe, the satellite IoT and machine-to-machine (M2M) sector ought to be looking at a bright horizon. But is this the case?
