Forum

Hi Guys,

Does anyone know of any good, in-depth, description of how SCA works (ie. Meru)? I understand the concept and what the final product looks like but I am still trying to wrap my mind around how it is actually accomplished.

Thanks,

The reasons that i choose for extricom is not purely for performance. No system can guarentee roaming like they do. Especially in environmtens where i have to deploy wifi / VoWIFI, this is a must (a lot of fire doors, thick steel walls).

As of using 802.11a, in a cell based solution you will definately get more throughput over an 802.11b/g network. However you would need a more dense solution of ap's, rates will drop earlier for clients as less propagation of the signal.

I believe that to actually see the perfomance difference we would need to build a large scale setup / hire some office and do some tests (i have actually done this test on smaller scale between extricom and meru).

Anyway with 802.11n hitting the enterprise market i believe extricom has an interresting solution to offer.

anonymouswifidude Escribi?3:

AKLEPPER,
My experience with the Extricom product was as recently as mid 2008. I also recall that oddly enough all the Switches I ever touched regardless of port density were equipped Fast Ethernet ports essentially creating a 100 Mbps bottleneck at the Wireless Switch.

Now on to your question. You are up against the design limitation of doing WiFi on a large scale (or dense scale) in the 2.4 Ghz spectrum with AP's utilizing Omnidirectional Antennas.

The solution to your problem is to get as many of your stations as possible into the 5 Ghz spectrum where there are ample non overlapping channels and utlizing higher gain directional antennas to eliminate hidden node and other issues.

Using this approach you can greatly increase the throughput of your WLAN over what you are proposing.

I also found the lack of management/monitoring visibility into the network to be an obstacle with the Extricom solution. Back when I was hands on with it there was no ability to see the number of associations and their status/statistics/Data Rates etc. on the Management Interface. You know, just basic stuff that your Netgear Wireless Router supplies for Residential use at $39.

anonymouswifidude Escribi?3:

I also found the lack of management/monitoring visibility into the network to be an obstacle with the Extricom solution. Back when I was hands on with it there was no ability to see the number of associations and their status/statistics/Data Rates etc. on the Management Interface. You know, just basic stuff that your Netgear Wireless Router supplies for Residential use at $39.

I agree, however the last year they have added quite a few of these options (you can now see associations per ap etc)

Their focus clearly was not on those options ;)