News Aruba Introduces Industry’s First Enterprise-Grade Wi-Fi 6E Solution

[Fatawan]

Here is the press release:

Aruba Introduces Industry’s First Enterprise-Grade Wi-Fi 6E Solution

Aruba announced the market’s first enterprise-grade Wi-Fi 6E solution set – the 630 Series of campus access points (APs), starting with the AP-635.

www.businesswire.com

The webpage on the Aruba website:

Aruba 630 Series Wi-Fi 6E APs

Aruba’s 630 Series Wi-Fi 6E Indoor Access Points unlock the 6 GHz band to provide fast, resilient, and secure connectivity.

www.arubanetworks.com

Data Sheet:

https://www.arubanetworks.com/assets/ds/DS_AP630Series.pdf

The unique thing here, other than being the first enterprise 6E solution, is the ultra tri-band filtering. This will be the first product that doesn't cut off UNII5 and allows full use of all 7 of the 160MHz bands in the new 6GHz band. There are asterisks indicating it won't start out this way, but will come after the first round of production. Round 1 will likely use the ceramic filters that cut off use of that first chunk of spectrum in the 6GHz band. First product comes out in Q3 2021.

 

[Gabebear]

UNII5 support is nice, the lower bands should have slightly more penetration power than the higher bands.

I’ve put off upgrading my home from WiFi5 and am stupid excited to finally see some real hardware shipping for 6ghz!

 

[Tech9]

This access point is going to be priced similarly to a trip to Aruba.

 

[Krisbi]

AP-635 inferior to AP-535/AP-515?

Is there any comparison of current chipsets regarding the maximum supported number of resource units (OFDMA)? According to Qualcomm´s homepage, they support up to 37 RUs. What about Broadcom, Mediatek, Marvell, Quantenna, ... ?

 

[Gabebear]

AP-635 inferior to AP-535/AP-515?

Is there any comparison of current chipsets regarding the maximum supported number of resource units (OFDMA)? According to Qualcomm´s homepage, they support up to 37 RUs. What about Broadcom, Mediatek, Marvell, Quantenna, ... ?

Aruba’s response on that thread today is interesting… I guess we’ll have to wait for someone to tear one apart to see chipsets.

 

[Krisbi]

Indeed, Aruba´s answer sounds like a flimsy excuse for me. I wouldn´t be suprised if the AP-635 uses some early unknown chipset with incomplete firmware.

 

[Krisbi]

So here is a benchmark using the access point by Aruba with all radios tested together:

There´s another video at

which shows tests with each radio on its own with higher benchmark results.

So with 6 GHz, 5 GHz and 2.4 GHz running single tests Aruba achieved 1034 Mbit/s, 1040 Mbit/s and 417 Mbit/s. When all tests ran together the Aruba achieved 906 Mbit/s, 902 Mbit/s and 396 Mbit/s.

 

[thiggins]

So with 6 GHz, 5 GHz and 2.4 GHz running single tests Aruba achieved 1034 Mbit/s, 1040 Mbit/s and 417 Mbit/s. When all tests ran together the Aruba achieved 906 Mbit/s, 902 Mbit/s and 396 Mbit/s.

The total is 2.204 Gbps from a 2.5 GbE port, using UDP. I don't know what the % overhead is for UDP, but it's ~ 6% for TCP/IP.

The Linksys Hydra Pro 6E review I just published produced total simultaneous throughput from three radios running TCP/IP of 2.35 Gbps for the ASUS GT-AXE11000 and 2.2 Gbps for the Linksys. The ASUS has a 2.5 GbE port; the LInksys has 5 GbE.

The tests aren't apples-to-apples because Aruba used UDP and 80 MHz channel bandwidth for 6 GHz. I used TCP/IP and 160 MHz channel bandwidth for 6 GHz. But given the difference in the two Aruba videos, it looks like some throttling is happening when all 3 radios are going.