You should have seen my wife’s face when she found me glued to the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show. “No, honey, come here!” I said, my face aglow with the bikini-clad pixels of Tyra and Heidi Klum. “You’ve got to see this!”
Arms crossed. Pursed lips. “Mm-hmm. Yes?”
I pointed at the laptop on the counter in front of me. “Not the models. The video. It’s high-def with a 19.2 megabits per second stream rate. Looks perfect, like HDTV, right?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“Now turn around.” I pointed at the plasma screen on the wall pulling a different part of the same video, a second stream at 18.4 Mbps, through our Xbox 360 with an attached 802.11n bridge. “That’s almost 40 megabits streaming over WiFi. I’ve never even been able to do one stream before, and now we’ve got two!”
My wife looked at the screens, looked back to me, and shrugged. “OK, then. I’ll leave you and the girls to it. Have fun.”
She walked away and slammed the front door. I don’t think she actually cared if I was having fun. Strange. Clearly, she didn’t understand that something amazing had fallen into my lap. Actually, let me rephrase that. Something incredible had happened to my network. With an access point clear across the house, transmitting through one floor and three or four walls, coping with literally a dozen interfering WiFi networks surrounding the house, I was getting wireless network performance unlike anything I’d ever seen before.
This was my first experience with beamforming, something I’d only seen vague mention of on long-term WiMAX roadmaps. But here it was in an 802.11n access point from a company I’d never heard of, and it blew away everything I’d ever seen a wireless product do before.
Interested? Then let’s dig in. I may not have runway models to offer you, but I still think you’ll be impressed.
- Open-Mouthed Amazement
- Beamforming Basics
- Inside On-Chip Phased Arrays
- The Client That Could Be
- On-Chip Challenges
- Ruckus And On-Antenna Phased Arrays
- Can You Hear Me Now?
- Test Gear: Ruckus 7962
- Test Gear: Cisco Aironet 1142 And Aruba AP125
- Test Environment
- Test Apps And Methods
- Zap In 2.4 GHz, Average
- Zap In 5 GHz, Average
- Zap At 2.4 And 5 GHz, Minimum
- Chariot At 2.4 GHz
- Chariot At 5 GHz
- Conclusion
- Angelini Weighs In On Beamforming At Home

You sir are an idiot
1.You cannot compare two products by testing them with a in-house developed software. It's like testing ATI vs nVIDIA with nvidia made benchmark.
2.If you do something get it done, don't just go with half measures. I don't care if you didn't have time. You should have planned this from the beginning. The tests are incomplete, and the article is filled with crap of Rukus and Cisco.
The network idea sounds better. I couldn’t get my 10 feet g network to transmit a tenth as much as my wired network without it dropping.
The numbers so far are astonishing, but are they realistic in a multi-client environnement? That's something I'd like to know!
Are you sure the differences you are seeing aren't simply due to higher power output? Couldn't the same improvements be obtained with a directional antenna like a Yagi?
When all the major players sell items that look almost the same, act similarly, and perform almost the same, there is something wrong with the industry.
One niggling concern, I felt reasonably safe with the unfocused cloud of RF surrounding me wherever I go, but I am not so sure about the tightly focused beam that the Ruckus provides. What happens to the poor joe who sits directly in the path of such a beam for 8 hours a day?
LOL! True enough. It honestly was a reference file I had on hand for such testing situations. Angelini obviously showed a bit more wisdom in his choice of in-house test content.
My absolutely unqualified opinion is "probably nothing." While the conditions are somewhat different, you might want to read a Tech Myths column segment I did over on Tom's Guide that touches on this issue. http://www.tomsguide.com/us/decibels-noise-canceling,review-1338-10.html
Excellent question, and one I hope to dive into in a later article. For now, I can only give you the anecdote on my opening page, running the same HD stream to two clients. Ruckus states that BeamFlex can sustain a 50 Mbps minimum per access point. Do the math on your client streams accordingly, I suppose.
Honestly honey, it's just a reference file, I swear it's not porn. I challenge you to find HD streaming content from the internet that highlights the subtle nuance of flesh tones.
Hey, the VS catalog mails to her, not me. I was merely trying to be a good husband and participate in her interests. ;-) ANYWAY. Back to beamforming, shall we?