Of course, Meru is 100 percent standards-compliant. As a WLAN infrastructure vendor, we must be. Our products are Wi-Fi certified, almost all our customers have legacy access points that interoperate perfectly with Meru, and Network Computing's tests were performed with standard clients.
Furthermore, we recently announced that the Wi-Fi Alliance has recertified our latest Access Point 200 Series products for 802.11 and WPA2 interoperability. Although the AP 200 products had achieved certification for 802.11, Meru chose to resubmit the latest version to the Wi-Fi Alliance as part of its ongoing quality-assurance program to ensure the continual delivery of best-of-breed products to customers and partners.
We feel that the results of the test are strongly in favor of Meru. The complete, raw bake-off test results that Network Computing shared with Meru Networks, and our detailed analysis of the results, are available at merunetworks.com/NWC_tests. Meru feels that the article provides an incomplete summary and misses the following key conclusions that are of primary interest to enterprise network administrators.
1. CLIENT DENSITY: Meru outperformed Cisco by more than 270 percent. With a Cisco AP, as the number of client devices increases, uplink traffic from clients chokes the downlink traffic to the clients. With a Meru AP, there is a near-perfect balance between uplink and downlink, independent of the number of clients. The test had eight clients with bidirectional traffic: Downlink airtime with Cisco was less than 30 percent, whereas with Meru the split was 48 percent; 52 percent uplink to downlink.
2. PREDICTABLE SERVICE: Meru outperformed Cisco by more than 400 percent. With a Cisco AP, slow clients disrupt the network by taking more airtime at the expense of faster clients--a Cisco network could be as slow as the slowest device! With a Meru AP, each client gets its fair share of airtime, and slower clients do not affect faster ones. In the test, Cisco's airtime ratio for 11-Mbps 802.11b clients versus 54-Mbps 802.11g clients was 83 percent-to-17 percent; Meru's ratio was 47 percent-to-54 percent.
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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.
