Comparing Ekahau Sidekick to other tools

 

 

I’m going to start this post with saying that the idea for this post came from the rssicompared.com website where I have posted some data.  This was more of “me, out in the field”, but this time I had a little extra time, a pad of paper, and some help from @WiFi_Princesa

 

We heard reports of bad Wi-Fi coverage for the Cisco 8821 series phones.  We both thought, “horsefeathers”.  Not on my watch!

 

We went onsite, and sat where the red dot is indicated below.  On the table were a few Wi-Fi clients/tools:

 

My Ekahau Sidekick

Netscout G2

Cisco 8821

Samsung S7 Edge

 

We had heard of “lousy Wi-Fi coverage” in the room with the red dot is located.  In order to prove it is not the network, we have to prove it is something else.  We made a rudimentary table of signal strength (since that is what was reported) on the devices we had with us:

 

Device:                 8821                     G2                         Sidekick                S7 Edge

 

AP #4                    -64                        -68                        -57                        -65

 

AP #5                    -70                        -75                        -65                        -72

 

AP #6                    -78                        -75                        -66                        -76

 

 

First of all, we learned that signal strength was not the problem, since we designed it for -67 dBm, and we met the requirement’s signal strength of -64 dBm.  Things are not always as they seem, since the strongest AP was #4, when you might expect one of the other two would be stronger.

 

The second thing we learned is that the farther we were from an access point, the more the results varied.

 

We also learned the Ekahau Sidekick “heard” anywhere from 5 to 10 dB better than the other devices.

 

Since all we can do is average out the set of clients, we are going to say that the Ekahau Sidekick can hear about 8dB better than some other popular devices.

 

Our next quest (in a later post) is going to see how an AP can see the other access points, since we need to know how the Cisco access points can hear each other.