wireless controllers

The importance of wireless site surveys

Hello again! Here’s some more information for you techs delving into the world of wireless. Wireless site surveys! One of the things I find often overlooked when implementing a wireless strategy, is the lack of one! Even when people listen to me about putting in the proper access points and controllers, sometimes they just don’t think about placement.

Now I don’t understand why on earth you wouldn’t do a wireless site survey. A proper survey can save you tons of headaches for your users and for yourself, as well as save you on countless hours of troubleshooting. Access points should not be installed into an organization with no regard to placement, that’s just a dumb idea. You’ll more than likely end up by way too many access points to deal with a given situation and end up wasting your money.

Instead, you should hire a wireless certified individual or company and have them come in and run a wireless site survey. They will come in and scan the surrounding area that you need to have wireless coverage in and they will present you with a nice report that shows you exactly how many access points you need, and where to place them for maximum coverage. Then from this report, you will have a good idea of which wireless controllers and access points you’ll need to buy.

Remember, don’t go into wireless blindly, take your time, do the proper legwork and install a solution that will make your users happy and make you look great!

-RP

Implementing Location Awareness in your Organization

Hi folks, so if there is one thing that is annoying it’s misplacing things. Whether it’s some sort of important customer inventory, or whether it’s a piece of hardware you own and you need to know it’s whereabouts. What do people do in large organizations where you need to keep track of things?

Location awareness! In this day and age of wireless, there should be a technology out there that can be leveraged to help us with this and there is. Using RFID you can tag valuable mobile equipment or product and then use a device to keep track of where that stuff is in your organization.

Cisco has a product called the Cisco Wireless Location Appliance that does just this and fits into the grand scheme of their Cisco Unified Wireless Network. Something like this would be deployed in an environment with wireless controllers and managed lightweight APs across your network. I have a feeling we’ll be seeing more of a need for these kind of things as mobile devices and our need to keep track of them becomes more prevalent in the years to come. You can read more about this here.

-RP