The report of my test of three-stream APs is now available – and the results were surprising, to say the least.
I continue to participate as a member of the Network World Lab Alliance, testing new wireless and mobile products and technologies. I recently completed a detailed examination of three-stream (nominally, 450 Mbps) .11n APs in an effort to discover what kind of improvement in throughput network managers might see when using this relatively new gear. I’d heard from colleagues that we might get only 10-15% improvement over two-stream products, which would hardly be worth writing home about, and such made sense given what we usually see with respect to diminishing returns. Well, 10-15% doesn’t begin to describe what kind of benefits can be realized with three-stream APs. While results varied, of course, across the products tested, some yielded improvements in throughput that were nothing short of astonishing.
I’ll let you read the article to see for yourself (Network World Insider registration is required). Note that separate postings cover the testing process and results, a discussion of the nomenclature of multi-stream .11n implementations, tips for buying a three-stream AP, and also a note on 802.11ac, which will indeed replace even three-stream .11n APs – but not for at least a couple of years. All are available via the link above.
This testing project actually took more than a month to complete. I used very high-end test equipment in a carefully-instrumented freespace environment, and any problems or anomalies were all explored and explained before results were recorded. I remain impressed with just how much time is required to set up a 30-second test run. But that’s what’s required if results are to be meaningful – and I hope you find them so.
