Wireless Access

802.11ac clients are slow to come. I remember 802.11n clients were quicker to market as I recall. We've had a lot of issues with the intel 7260 11ac NIC. Even with the latest drivers the 7260 is lackluster. Roaming seems to be problematic.There appears to be issue trying to achieve expected HT rates. 

Apple had issues with its first 802.11ac release with the Mac Book Air. This was reportable as a tcp windowing issue.

Ive also tested many of the USB 802.11ac NICs. Not a fan of USB NICs, not an enterprise solution. 

I'm curious of everyone else's experience on 11ac clients? Anyone care to comment about first account experience ?

Out of the 4 11ac clients I have, the HTC One performs consistency well.

I haven't had a good experience with 3 different USB 11ac adapters: netgear , asus and d-link

Only dot11ac device I have so far is my Nexus5. 

Highly recommended for WIFI performance and all around great platform.  

Go GOOGLE !

+1 LIKE

JF

Just did some nonscientific testing. Clients were about 15 feet, line of sight from AP. iPerf 3 was used with default settings.

Client Info

Dell XPS 13 running Windows 8.1 w/ Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 7260 Card - Driver 16.6.2.1

AT&T HTC One running Android 4.3

AP Info

Aruba AP-225, single 1 GB uplink, 80 MHz channel

Dell XPS / Intel 7260

HTC One

My Intel 7260 seems to perform pretty well.  I use it with Airmagnet to perform active surveys and roams really nicely, and much better than any other adapter.  But so far that has only been on 802.11n wireless infrastructure.  I will be testing on the AP225 deployment I have just configured soon, so I'll see how that compares.

Might be worth taking a look at a post I did quite a while ago...

http://community.arubanetworks.com/t5/Unified-Wired-Wireless-Access/802-11ac-adapters-warning-heads-up/m-p/122313#M26281

This could cause real issues with users on their own machines (who've bought this type of adapter off the shelf).

I believe the chipset in this adapter is fairly common, and the problem was down to this. Broadcom I believe (not 100%).

As an update, Netgear have released a fixed beta code to me to remediate. I can't share it due to NDA. God knows how long it will take to make it into the released versions. The effort in proving to them it was wrong was UNBELIEVEABLE.

Cheers.

Michael, 

What OS and driver revision are you using?

The installer file they gave me (which resolved it) is "standalone-V1.0.0.13-beta-DFS".

When used, the nic driver properties report the driver version as 6.30.145.48.

Don't know if it's officially released yet!

My Intel 7260 is using driver 16.6.0.8.  So far so good, but tomorrow I will test with an ac network.

Though we all dont like USB 802.11ac NICs, they are here to stay for some time.

So, I did some basic testing with Netgear A6200 and the results were good to start off with.

It was using MCS 6, 80 MHz and 2 Spatial streams, giving a link rate of 526.5 Mbps and was pretty stable.

I could see a bunch of troubleshooting commands on the controller side for checking the client connectivity, which will be very useful for checking performances of 802.11ac clients.

I could see that the TX rate was 866 Mbps which was the maximum for 2 spatial streams and the Rx rate was 526 Mbps.

I did some moving around and wanted to see how many frames were sent and received with which datarate. The command that you can use for this is "show ap debug radio-stats". Below output gave good amount of information about the same.

More information about the client health was also available from the webUI.