7 July 2021

Wi-Fi 6 AP Stress test

Categories: Indoor wireless,

Many organizations are now trying to support a combination of streaming media, VoIP, and data downloads on their Wi-Fi networks, and they are considering upgrading to Wi-Fi 6 access points (APs) to improve performance. Everyone has seen the marketing language of Wi-Fi 6 promising multi-gigabit throughput, so it seems that any AP with the Wi-Fi 6 designation should easily support various high-load scenarios found in enterprises, schools, hotels, hospitals, and other organizations.

To test this theory, Packet6 recently validated a set of “stress tests” on five popular enterprise-grade, cloud-managed 4×4:4 Wi-Fi 6 APs from HPE Aruba, Extreme Networks, Juniper Mist, Cisco Meraki and CommScope RUCKUS. While all the tested APs share the same Wi-Fi 6 specification, vendor implementation clearly yields significant performance differences under the high-demand traffic which the APs were evaluated.

What Packet6 Tested

The test was designed to gauge these APs’ overall performance in a mixed traffic environment that included large and small file transfers, high-definition (HD) video streaming and VoIP. In fact, the RUCKUS AP delivered roughly 40 percent better throughput than the APs from Aruba, Extreme, and Meraki.

Video Streaming Results

While four out of the five APs supported trouble-free streaming performance before the test, the RUCKUS AP was the only one that delivered 30 stall-free streams during the test.

Watch the video here


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Wi-Fi 6 Stress test