Wireless Performance Measure

[lAhmed Saadl]

Dears,

 I currently have an area that is equipped with AP 1700 series access points, but I am in the process of transitioning to the 9115 series. I would like to understand/ figure out the improvements that have occurred after deploying the new APs on the wireless network... may be as a graph, percentage..! Is it possible to utilize Cisco Prime for this purpose? I would appreciate your insights with the possible ways to check that.

WLC: 5520

Thank you

[balaji.bandi]

if you have done the survey before replacing and make sure the AP in right place as per the survey, sure you see some different when you replace old AP with new Cat 9K AP.

Prime 3.10 should able to show teh difference in the MAP's (also user input also important.)

[lAhmed Saadl]

Sure. A site survey was conducted previously. My question is, how can I determine and verify the changes that have occurred? In other words, how can I determine whether improvements have taken place? May be examining statistics or similar data would be necessary to assess the situation accurately !! How to actually obtain this information?  

[ammahend]

Great question because lot of people who upgrade their infrastructure have a similar expectation, however there is more to improving user experience than just upgrading APs ? Let me ask a few question before I answer that question.

Had the switch port changed to mGig since 9115 does support 2.5 gig ?

has client side changes like do the clients support 802.11ax standard or they are still supporting old standard ?

[lAhmed Saadl]

Thank you.

Yes, changed to mGig.

Regarding clients.. No, not exactly, no changes happened.

[ammahend]

The effective datarate between AP and client is a result of lot variables like modulation technique, number of spatial stream supported, channel width etc. see the MCS index https://mcsindex.com for more details, so if you have older client that do not support 802.11ax attributes, then you won’t be able to take a lot of advantages of AP refresh using 802.11ax improvements, although it’s still a good move to have your infrastructure ready, historically endpoints are 2 years behind infrastructure. so you have future proofed your infrastructure.

you will see over all throughout improvement,  because of mGig on AP.

If you want to do some throughput tests, you can can consider iPerf tool

[Flavio Miranda]

@lAhmed Saadl 

 If you replace the AP "as is", meaning the same number of Access Points using the same position in the building, there will no improvements to be measured.

 1700 AP is already 802.11ac and from ac to ax there was no improvement, only merchandising do sell stuff. I assume that your question comes from managers pressure telling you "we bought this very expensive Access Points. Now we need to show that the performance is way better".

This is a mistake, in my opinion. There will be no improvement on what really  matters for Wi-Fi which is "Air time  utilization". 

AX came with huge promise of performance improvement. They said that OFDMA would fix all the problems related to air time utilization by using different channel for download and upload. Non sense.

Dont matter if the Access point is Mgig or only giga, the Air interface will never full the 1 giga uplink. Way before the 1 Giga uplink gets full, the air interface is already saturated.

 People are buying very expansive access points with 6Ghz when there are no clients in the market.  When the clients get to the market with 6Ghz those access points will be already EoL and newer access point needs to be bougth.

Sorry to say that but this is how I see wifi indutry now a days.