Cisco's reply surprised us: Rather than spinning the results, it suggested that Meru was violating 802.11 standards. More specifically, it shared internal analysis that indicated Meru was manipulating the 802.11 duration field, a key element of 802.11's virtual carrier sense architecture.
Meru dismissed Cisco's allegations, initially suggesting that they were the latest of a long string of false accusations, dating back to the days when Meru and Airespace were competing for attention as start-up enterprise WLAN vendors.
After we painstakingly documented the problem through our own analysis of packet captures, however, Meru's response changed. In an October meeting in our labs, Meru's CEO, Ihab Abu-Hakima, and chief product architect, Joe Epstein, asserted that the results were the manifestation of a bug in Meru's rate-adaptation algorithm. They further insisted that manipulation of the duration field in data frames played no role whatsoever in Meru's competitive performance benefits. Abu-Hakima was apologetic and assured us that the company was making significant new investments in quality assurance. He also chastised its competitors, claiming that they had a long record of misrepresentation.
Meanwhile, Epstein discussed the rate-adaptation bug and spent considerable time answering our questions about other elements of the Meru architecture, including the single-channel design. He also provided us with a lengthy, and quite helpful, interpretation of our test results. We came away from the meeting prepared to give Meru the benefit of the doubt ... until we saw the duration-field issue crop up once more, in a slightly different context.
Back To The Test Bed
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