What's new

In situ testing

  • SNBForums Code of Conduct

    SNBForums is a community for everyone, no matter what their level of experience.

    Please be tolerant and patient of others, especially newcomers. We are all here to share and learn!

    The rules are simple: Be patient, be nice, be helpful or be gone!

dfarning

Occasional Visitor
First off a great big thanks to everyone who makes this site so good. I just realized that this is my goto source for home networking. I don't stop by every day, rather I just stop by every year or so when I need a new piece of kit for my home network. I don't have the time or the interest to keep up with daily developments in the small networking space. But, I am sure glad you folks do... and are willing to take the time to communicate it to the rest of us.

One thing that would make the testing more useful for readers like me is more in situ testing. I realize this would be more subjective than the rigorous testing SNB does now. Something along the lines of automobile test drive.

As Tim mentioned in another forum post, stations often behave are like unruly 3 year olds. That situation is not likely to change anytime soon. It is the routers, APs, or Wi-Fi systems responsibility to maintain reasonable order on the playground.

I have been trying to figure out how to construct these test so as not to be a common griper. I'll be the first to admit, I don't a deep understanding of the capability of either the ocotoscope boxes or Ixchariot. They are out of my price range.

My initial thought would to use Ixchariot to create a synthetic browsing load, then create a synthetic 1080 video stream (or even a 4k video stream). For testing one could then test how many steams of of each type an AP could handle.

A useful metric would be a graph of stream vs jitter. I appropriated the streams vs jitter idea from
at the 20 minute mark. I don't know it something similar can be scripted into IxChariot.

To be useful this test would require multiple physical stations. Each running one stream rather a single station running multiple stream to simulate the unruly nature of 3 years olds. I am not sure if the octostream box can handle multiple physical devices.

If this seems sane, I could look into it a bit deeper. My knowledge of networking is spotty at best. I design tests for electric bike batteries... I know a bit about testing methodology. One thing I have seen is that as soon as a respected reviewer starts testing and reporting on something, it become more important to manufactures and vendors!

Thanks again for the great site.
 

Latest threads

Support SNBForums w/ Amazon

If you'd like to support SNBForums, just use this link and buy anything on Amazon. Thanks!

Sign Up For SNBForums Daily Digest

Get an update of what's new every day delivered to your mailbox. Sign up here!
Top