ZyXEL Communications, a leading provider of secure broadband networking, Internet access and connected home products, today announced the results of an independent Wi-Fi performance analysis conducted by the University of Brescia that reveals that smart antenna technology is the key to overcoming the biggest hindrance to wireless performance - co-channel interference. The report found that the ZyXEL 802.11ac Dual Radio Smart Antenna 3x3 Access point (WAC6503D-S) outperformed the throughput speeds of competing 802.11ac APs by as much as 75 percent.

As leading experts in the field of wireless network performance, the University of Brescia’s Wireless Networking Group compared 802.11ac Wi-Fi APs equipped with and without smart antenna technology from four leading networking brands: Aruba, Cisco, Ruckus, and ZyXEL. The results revealed that ZyXEL’s Wi-Fi access point delivered the highest total aggregate throughput of all access points in the test. The complete report is available at http://netweb.ing.unibs.it/ntw/sa/report.pdf.

Co-channel interference is an unavoidable dilemma of today's fast evolving 802.11ac technology, simply because the channel width is higher and the available channels become fewer. This means more Wi-Fi APs are operating on the same channel and interfering with each other. Reducing transmission power is an obvious thought, but it results in worse coverage and dead zones. The research team compared the APs in co-channel interference environments and found that ZyXEL’s WAC6503D-S outperformed competing APs with as much as 75 percent higher throughput.

“The analysis not only showed the extent to which antenna performance and co-channel interference impact Wi-Fi performance, but it also revealed that not all smart antenna technologies are the same,” explained Shawn Rogers, Marketing Development Manager at ZyXEL. “The report found that ZyXEL’s smart antenna technology actually handled co-channel interference much better than a competing smart antenna product. The combined technology and wireless expertise that ZyXEL has incorporated into the design of the WAC6503D-S enables it to overcome Wi-Fi challenges more effectively than competing products and makes it the top achiever in nearly every performance test it is subjected to.”

The ZyXEL WAC6503D-S is part of ZyXEL’s premium portfolio of 11ac Dual Radio Unified Pro Access Points and has won a number of industry awards in Asia, Europe and the U.S.