The No Strings Attached Show was recently invited into the Cisco real-world labs in Richfield, Ohio to get a behind the scenes look at what goes into the claims made by many manufacturers and how this manifests itself in real-world testing situations.
The first highlight of the testing environment is it’s dynamic and seemingly ‘misaligned’ nature. We wanted to ensure that, like in a typical office environment, not all client devices were laid out in nice neat rows.
Arguably the most important piece of the lab setup was the genuine mix of clients that were being used. Too often do vendors select 50 of client X and 50 of client Y and call it good.
No throughput test is complete without a few tablets in the mixture. We put 10 iPad Air's in the mix just to add some 802.11n 2SS devices into the data.
We used Ixia Chariot to generate a standard base of traffic mix. There were no modifications done to the default (and difficult to do) client throughput tests aside from the duration of each test.
S01E03 - Cisco AP2700 from NSA Show on Vimeo.
Cisco did not compensate the NSA Show in any shape or form to perform this test. Cisco did take care of travel expenses as well as a Cisco AP2700 for further testing.
We loaded up 7.6MR2 as it is the currently shipping code.
We used a mixture of clients as we would expect to see used in real world scenarios. This included not only 802.11ac clients but 802.11n clients as well.