Everything Instant On

Hi everyone, I'm planning to get few units of this Instant On AP to replace my crappy MikroTik APs, wondering what is the max speed you guys can get on 5GHz for 2x2 MIMO devices?

Hi Heidarren, Please find the different types of APs and the respective speed,

Indoor APs :

AP 11 -- 2x2 -- 1167 Mbps;

AP 12 -- 3x3 -- 1600 Mbps;

AP 15 -- 4x4 -- 2033 Mbps;

Outdoor AP :

AP 17 -- 2x2 -- 1167 Mbps;

Desk/Wall APs :

AP 11D -- 2x2 -- 1167 Mbps;

@Karthik_J thanks for your reply. What I would like to know is in real world test, what is the speed you can get from it, I understand there will be many elements like interference and so will affect the result, but it can be a good reference for potential buyers. Thanks.

I have asked a similar question before. With an AP15 and like 1m away, I would not get more than around 500 Mbps throughput in either direction. I have tried with Mac clients, iperf3 (worse results) and file transfers with sftp and various other things.

I have been told to contact customer support - but in contrast, when putting a Cisco 1852 AP (oops, the "C"-word) in exactly the same place, performing the same downloads, I'd nearly get line speed 1G.

Don't get me wrong - I am really pleased with the product and like it's features a lot, but sheer throughput hasn't convinced me so far. 

I also use AP11s, and alhough I did not conduct extensive performance tests with them, they seemed to perform significantly below the AP15s (which was expected).

Thanks for your interest in the product. We do not publicly disclose open air performance numbers because they tend to vary quite a bit depending on the surrounding conditions. We do get higher performance numbers as part of our internal testing in clean air environments. However, what you observe currently seems to be within a reasonable margin of what we can expect in a standard open air environment. Be confident that we continuously thrive to improve on the product performance so it may improve overtime with software updates.

That said, there are few things you need to take into consideration when comparing products, especially the Cisco 1852:

1) Instant On continuously inspect the traffic to provide visibility and breakdown of what application are running on in your network. This definitely reduces the raw performance, but has the benefit of having a better understanding of your network utilization.

2) Even though they are both 4x4, the Cisco 1852 is at least 2-3 times more expensive than the Aruba Instant On AP15. Therefore, we believe that you get more than an adequate price/performance ratio especially with our simplified interface, remote and mobile management of your sites, a number of additional features and benefits, and more to come in the future.

I testes the AP15 with a Surface Book 2 as Client (Only 2 Antennas)

Other APs I tested were Sophos APX320 (2x2) and Aruba IAP-303 (2x2).

All of them delivered similar results (Between 400 and 500 MBit) That is what I would expect from a 2x2 Client.

Unfortunatelly I don't have a 4x4 Client to test it with that.

When i first plugged in the AP15 it chose a very busy channel and I only got 150 MBit. But after a few minutes / hours it chose a better channel and I got the results posted above.

I agree to all of your points and can follow your line of arguments. And I also see I should not directly compare the Instant On product line to a competitor's enterprise products. I am certainly convinced of the product value and like it's performance. To me, however, the hardware AP15 looks quite similar to an AP315 and what I implied was - is there a software bandwidth throttle or artificially imposed performance limit with Instant On to differentiate from the enterprise product ? My observations would certainly second this assumption....

Maybe the Cisco AP uses a 160MHz Channel Width?

That could be the reason for a higher throughtput.

@axthemax - there are no artifical performance throttle put in place for Instant On. The APs will deliver the best performance possible, while selecting the best channel and power thresholds.