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Enterprise wireless vendors have now for a while now been able to change the channel of an access point in both 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz to avoid interference from outside their wireless network. Even more importantly nowadays with the amount of access points businesses have on their network to avoid interference from their own access points otherwise known as co channel interference.
When an enterprise system decides that it needs to change the channel of an access point due to some kind of interference for example, how does it know truly which is the best channel to change too. Carrying out spectrum analysis on the channel will simply just analyse the amount of energy and noise on the channel and isn’t really the best judge to whether it will be a better channel to use or not. The only real way of doing it is to carry out a proper throughput test on the channel and comparing the results.
This is what Ruckus are doing with Channel fly. The system in the background will carry out a throughput test across all the available channels not just 1,6 and 11 and compare the results. It will then move the access points to the best performing channels.
In busy environments especially where there is a lot of 802.11 sources on interference the busiest channels tend to be 1, 6 and 11. This is because most the WLAN solutions out there are trying to do the right thing and use channels 1, 6 and 11 to prevent co channel interference.
If you think about it this now means you will most likely get better performance from not using 1, 6 and 11.
This is what Ruckus is doing with channel fly. So effectively on the fly it is carrying out throughput checks not just spectrum analysis like the other vendors across all the channels and making a comparison of which is best to use before moving to the channel.