Spirent Communications has announced the release of the Octobox STA Automation Package, the industry’s first solution to fully automate comprehensive performance testing and validation of client stations and devices on Wi-Fi 6/6E and Wi-Fi 7 networks.
The new automation package is designed to dramatically accelerate Wi-Fi station testing by replacing time consuming, inconsistent, and resource-intensive manual testing with structured, repeatable, and scalable validation automated workflows.
Wi-Fi technologies are evolving rapidly with Wi-Fi 6 and 6E implementations projected to exceed 80 percent of market share in 2025, and next generation Wi-Fi 7 adoptions making significant inroads. This rapid uptake of the new era of wireless technology is presenting challenges for manufacturers, eager to ensure reliable performance of increasingly sophisticated Wi-Fi connected devices.
“The complexity and time required to test next-generation Wi-Fi devices has increased exponentially with advancements like 320 MHz channels, 4096 QAM, and Multi-Link Operation,” says James Kimery, Spirent’s VP of Wireless Product Management. “Our new STA Automation Package is designed to help quality assurance teams tackle these challenges head on, with comprehensive automated performance testing workflows that can reduce test time by up to 70 percent compared with manual methods and enable the execution of dozens of test scenarios in the time it once took to run just a few.”
Spirent’s Octobox testbed is a customisable set of isolated chambers and instruments for testing over-the-air (OTA) Wi-Fi equipment and devices and the new STA Automation Package provides a fully automated test suite that ensures optimal performance in real-world conditions. It enables manufacturers to automate repeatable, overnight and parallel multi-station test execution to eliminate inconsistencies associated with manual testing, and enable validation of more devices, across more environments, more frequently.
The STA Automation Package addresses key issues in evaluating Wi-Fi devices:
- Performance and throughput: Achieve gains of up to 50 percent with comprehensive multi-station testing
- Scalability: Supports extensive multi-device, multi-environment testing without human intervention
- Comprehensive validation: Ensures max throughput, rate vs. range, fixed MCS sweep, MU-MIMO, OFDMA, roaming reliability, and backwards compatibility
The STA Automation Package builds upon Octobox’s comprehensive Wi-Fi station testing capabilities and integrates seamlessly into the Octobox testbed ecosystem, enabling manufacturers to thoroughly validate a range of Wi-Fi stations such as consumer smartphones, laptops and tablets, healthcare and education applications, and network devices.
The Octobox STA Automation Package is also available as part of Spirent’s Test as a Service (TaaS) for Wi-Fi Devices to reduce the turn-around time for devices submitted to Spirent for performance testing.
