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Whether it’s in an office or an airport, a shopping center or a stadium, Wi-Fi network infrastructure is playing an ever-greater role in our lives. But as our dependency on Wi-Fi grows, validating the performance of network infrastructure in the lab – before it’s deployed – is no longer enough.
Whether you’re moving a business to new premises, or preparing to wow sports fans with state-of-the-art, in-stadium services, you need to know your production infrastructure is going to deliver from the word ‘go.’ If it doesn’t, you risk losing money as your employees struggle to connect to customers – or losing face, as fans find there’s insufficient bandwidth to go around, and your new services fall at the first hurdle.
A key problem to overcome is load testing live networks to their limits, which has always been slow, expensive, and incredibly hard to do well.
Optimized Wi-Fi Performance Validation
Consider a scenario where a service provider is tasked with validating Wi-Fi performance in a large corporate office. With the move-in date approaching, the company wants to ensure the network can handle the high volume of connections expected, without compromising performance.
Challenges of Traditional Testing
Validating Wi-Fi performance in just one section of a multi-story office building typically requires:
Hundreds of Wi-Fi clients
To replicate the conditions of a busy office, numerous Wi-Fi devices—laptops, smartphones, smart TVs—need to connect simultaneously.
Hundreds of test assistants
Each of these Wi-Fi clients typically need to be manually operated and moved between access points to assess mobility performance.
Weeks of testing time
Testing in this manner is slow and resource intensive.
Limited test integrity
With a large team manually managing the test devices, repeatability is difficult, impacting the reliability of the results.
A Smarter Approach
A more efficient solution in such a scenario is emulating Wi-Fi clients. Instead of relying on physical devices and manual intervention, Spirent’s Octobox testbeds replicate the comprehensive noise and spatial conditions of even the most complex wireless channels. The solution combines traffic emulation, channel emulation, and performance evaluation into an integrated platform
A service provider can recreate the conditions of a fully operational office floor, pushing the network infrastructure to its limits in a controlled, repeatable manner. This approach enables testing to be conducted by a small team from a single location, significantly reducing time and costs.
With this emulation-based methodology, organizations can confidently validate Wi-Fi network performance before deployment, ensuring seamless connectivity for their end users.
A solution for everyone
As Wi-Fi rapidly becomes the backbone of modern business, load testing network infrastructure with Wi-Fi client emulation isn’t just for telcos.
It can help organizations of all kinds ensure their Wi-Fi performs as expected, when the demand – and stakes – are highest.
Explore Spirent’s Wi-Fi testing solutions for Wi-Fi 6, 6E, and 7, along with our automation test packages designed to streamline and accelerate your wireless testing.
