WifiNigel

The phrase “game changer” is banded around a great deal by our good friends in sales and marketing. It seems to accompany  just about every new product or service that they may introduce. Being a techie (and a rather reserved Brit), I’m not one for throwing around such emotional, bombastic language lightly. But after having been given early access to a new product from Ekahau, I’m going to say it: yes…this is a “game changer”. Read on to find out why… (Download a PDF of this article here ) Background If you’re a current user of Ekahau Site Survey (or any wireless survey product come to think of it), you’ll be familiar with the ritual of assembling your survey dongle collection each time you need to perform a wireless survey. To correctly survey, you’ll need at least two dongles gathering Wi-Fi RF data (one per band), together with one or two spectrum analysis dongles scanning both bands of the Wi-Fi spectrum. In most cases, all of the dongles are invariably connected to ...

I recently attended the Ekahau Certified Survey Engineer (ECSE) training course, presented by Keith Parsons. In addition to learning about using Ekahau Site Survey  (ESS), Keith also shared some valuable insights in to best practice wireless LAN design and surveying techniques. One of these insights was a best practice approach to measuring loss through obstructions and attenuation areas, such as doors, walls and warehouse racking, when gathering data for a WLAN predictive model.  In this article, I’ll share the details of that approach and some mistakes you might be making in your own measuring approach. Please visit the Ekahau blog site to see my guest posting for the full details on this topic.

I was recently involved in some work for an organization that had a newly constructed building to expand their, already sizable, campus. The building was a new, state-of-the-art facility that would require ubiquitous WiFi network coverage for a range of devices, including wireless voice handsets. Like many organisations, they were faced with the challenge of specifying the wireless equipment that they would require long before the building had even started construction. In order to secure the funding they would need for the new wireless infrastructure components (i.e. APs, wireless controllers, licensing), they had to try to anticipate what the new wireless network would look like, taking account of the services that they would require. The organisation realised that they would require a few more access points than might be usually expected for basic data services over wireless, but had taken a best guess at how many APs they might require and where they might go. When we walk...