Cisco vs Aruba – throughput

A while back one of our customers asked us to do an vendor assessment of their wireless infrastructure. I went and did some research on what type of testing will be suitable for our client and found these three “independent” reports where the Cisco 3700 Series Access Point was compared against the Aruba AP-225. In this post I will only show the results from their throughput testing. What a variety of results!

The first assessment was done by Miercom in November 2013 and these were the results as described by them:

‘The Cisco Aironet 3702i delivered greater throughput than the Aruba AP-225 in all 12 scenarios in multi-client performance testing. The difference in throughput ranged from a low of 16.6% to one client to a high of 83.2% to the maximum population, 60 clients supporting 2 or 3 spatial streams, shown here.’

As shown in the Miercom figure above the Cisco 3702i provided more than 83.2% greater throughput per client than Aruba AP-225 with 60 devices supporting 2 or 3 spatial streams.

The second assessment was done by Novarum in June 2014 and these were the results as described by them:

‘The Aruba AP-225 delivered an average of 302 Mbps in bi-directional throughput across 60 clients – twice the aggregate throughput of Cisco’s 3702i which was 137 Mbps. The results were consistent for each test run, and inline with the test results shown for the sixty client throughput test with downstream only traffic shown.’

The third assessment was done by Tolly and commissioned by Meru Networks in June 2014 and these were the results as described by them:

‘The Meru Networks AP832i solution outperformed the competing solutions in all scenarios but one. The Meru Networks solution outperformed the Aruba Networks offering by approximately 2x in the tests involving VoIP and video streaming.

With the exception of the bidirectional data test, the Meru Networks AP832i solution performance was anywhere from 1.21x to 1.32x that of the Cisco Systems Aironet 3702i solution.’

Looking at these results there are two important aspects to take out of it. One – who commissioned the assessment. Two – don’t take the results seriously.

Reference

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CCkQFjAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dit.co.jp%2Fproducts%2Fmeru_networks%2Fpdf%2Ftolly214124meruwlanperformancevsarubaandcisco.pdf&ei=V1hpVNTPHIq0uASO_YLYCQ&usg=AFQjCNEDuwQJ3xmb-DrAOBtlU3W6wdLPMw&sig2=bBMOoOF7dI9o82JAqZtpRA&bvm=bv.79142246,d.c2E

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CB8QFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.arubanetworks.com%2Fpdf%2Ftechnology%2FTR_Novarum.pdf&ei=c15pVNmuBIq1uATrs4C4Ag&usg=AFQjCNFpEEdts_yGzRFa0lVgW6f-1aCALA&sig2=vOvTSIQMjIuXvkwI8EFOlw&bvm=bv.79142246,d.c2E

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CB8QFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cisco.com%2Fweb%2Flearning%2Fle21%2Fonlineevts%2Fwireless%2Fmiercom-report-cisco-ap-3702i.pdf&ei=il9pVOXwFYyiuQTrzIHoAg&usg=AFQjCNH7pGsEeF9sgbiNQtbOjnPxSN21qA&sig2=ogeiaKPxNQs9PIQP2zw88w&bvm=bv.79142246,d.c2E