The Luxul Xen XAP-1020 802.11n Wireless Access Point Could Be Your Solution.
October 18, 2011

A significant whole-house automation system may include several 802.11b/g WiFi devices. Add in your laptop, smartphone, and iPad and you could easily be exhausting the bandwidth of a traditional wireless baseband station with a single b/g channel. Even with a dual-band baseband station you may not have enough 802.11n WiFi devices to offload the b/g channel.

Add to the above a large coverage area or significant blind spots in the home and your single most challenging component in a connected home implementation is the wireless network itself—the basic backbone used by the wireless devices in the environment.

Maintaining complete and consistent wireless network coverage can be a real challenge in any networking environment. Every installation is unique and a solution that works in some environments may fall short in others. The traditional method for providing complete coverage in the home is to install multiple wireless access points—requiring additional time, costs, and labor. This method also introduces other potential problems:

• Increased interference and static “noise” caused by overlapping signals
• Mobile devices often lose connectivity when moving between access point coverage areas
• More access points means more potential failures and technical issues.

The optimal method for avoiding such challenges is to simplify the network by covering the entire home with a single access point.

For a dependable experience with your automation system and other wireless devices
you'll want to ensure the availability of a reliable, high-quality wireless network. After last month's announcement of the new Xen product family from Luxul, a solution to WiFi network performance problems appears to be at hand.

The Luxul Xen High Performance Access Point (Model XAP-1020) has shown in field tests an impressive capability to resolve nasty WiFi coverage issues in large homes.

The details of WiFi network improvements with Xen have been documented by Luxul in a white paper which shows remarkable gains in signal strength and data rate for the model XAP-1020 versus a popular, name brand wireless 802.11n router.

The case study was for a 3-floor, 7500 sq ft home with the wireless access point/router located in the basement floor of the home. Only the areas nearest the wap/router location in the basement floor and directly above the wap/router on the main floor displayed good signal strength from the router. However the signal strength from the XAP-1020 was good on all three floors of the home.

The data rate tests were also impressive for the Luxul product. The data rate was measured using the IPerf tool on a laptop at 10 different points in the home. Only the data point closest to the wap/router location in the basement floor showed a comparable rate of about 28 Mbps for both wap/router devices. For the other 9 locations the XAP-1020 showed a significantly higher data rate compared to the router, an order of magnitude higher in some locations.