Capacity and Reach
Everyone has to live within the same IEEE limitations; the differences are all in how you use the standards, and how you add to and improve them in your proprietary software.
Aruba is has extraordinary capacity and reach because of special software hard–coded into the components of its access points.
Beamforming—that advancement that made Ruckus famous—has been incorporated and improved. This makes the access points automatically shape and optimize their transmit channels to fit the local physical environment. They also do space time block encoding to increase the wireless range and improve reception.
Aruba access points also automatically filter out interference from high-power cellular service towers and specialized cellular networks. They also have Passpoint, an algorithm set that seamlessly transitions cellular clients to the wireless network when they get in range.
All Aruba access points collaborate locally—and automatically—to actively manage all wireless sessions and optimize the wireless client loads in any local area—balancing clients across access points and sending them to the radios with the right frequency to deliver optimum service.
Aruba access points also have built-in Bluetooth radios for the support of local hardware management and the delivery of enhanced services to local Bluetooth-equipped devices.
You don’t have to climb a ladder; start up a management session with a Bluetooth-equipped management device. Aruba access points also have built in Zigbee radios that provide data channels independent of the usual wireless traffic, to support the hordes of IoT sensors with low-speed, bursty traffic that can’t be interrupted by conventional wireless traffic. You can serve high-capacity regular traffic and low-bandwidth IoT communications in the same radio, and the two will never meet.
Aruba access points supporting WIFI 6 offer a highly efficient MIMO that can be shared among multiple users, instead of just one user at a time. This provides high-capacity wireless services to large numbers of WIFI6-capable clients from a single access point. Yes, you can support over 1,000 connections and up to 200 simultaneous active sessions with one access point.
Management
Aruba wireless systems are famous for requiring much less management intervention than other wireless systems. They are also famous for having the best management systems.
We covered the wealth of self-management built into the hardware of the access points that essentially eliminates human intervention, but when that intervention is needed Aruba provides the best alternatives.
Instant Access point management. This management is already built into the access points themselves, and just needs to be turned on. It’s possible to aggregate hundreds of individual access points into a single, self-managing cluster that can support as many as 5,000 users at any site. One access point is nominated as the master controller, and that access point provides the point of management of the entire cluster—web into that access point to see the activity on the entire cluster and to manage that cluster. The other access points in the cluster then automatically nominate a new master controller if that designated access point fails. So this is very effective, very uncomplicated management for exactly zero extra cost.