A Valuable Service
A WiFi performance assessment is a valuable service for all businesses experiencing WiFi problems. It is also a smart investment for companies moving forward with their digital transformation strategies, such as implementing new cloud-based applications or IoT devices.
The challenge now is, how much does the service cost? To this day, you still can’t get a price online for this type of service.
Video Transcription
What is a WiFi Performance Assessment?
First, we need to define what a WiFi performance assessment is.
A WiFi performance assessment is a site survey of your existing network and physical environment to assess the current coverage, speed, and throughput rates, roaming, and throughput performance of your wireless network.
So, the goal of an assessment is to document any areas of concern and provide a detailed plan to fix those known issues and optimize network performance.
Infrastructure Changes
Any time you are making a major change to either your infrastructure, your business applications, or the devices that are being used inside of your environment, you’re going to want to do a WiFi performance assessment.
Those major changes vary across those different buckets.
For example, with your infrastructure, if you’re adding access points or changing the location or placement of those access points, switching out models, changing switches, adding new switches.
Anything you are doing with the design or configuration, you are going to want to do a performance assessment to make sure that you’re not causing more harm than good with those moves.
Technology Changes
So, as organizations move through the different generations of WiFi technology, so for example, going from 802.11n to 802.11ac and now moving to 802.11ax or as some call it WiFi 6, a WiFi performance assessment would also be recommended.
If you perform an assessment as you change out the technology or do a technology refresh, it allows you to have a benchmark to measure against when you do any future technology refreshes or if you start to experience issues.
Business Application Changes
If you’re adding a new business application or changing from one application to the other, you are going to want to do an assessment.
We have seen customers who changed out their POS system, for example, and wanted to make sure that on day one of going live with that POS system that their network was properly optimized to be able to support that application so they wouldn’t go down and interrupt their operations once they went live.
Device Changes
The same thing with devices.
We’re adding IoT devices all of the time, new users come on, and they are using more and more different types of devices sometimes out of our control.
Anytime we notice an influx of devices or a change like that in the devices that our network is supposed to support, we should do an assessment to make sure that we’re optimized to properly handle those scenarios.
If you’re implementing a lot of those big network changes, you are going to be doing a lot more assessments, and that is going to determine how often you need to do one.
On the other side of it, though, what if your network doesn’t make a lot of those frequent changes?
Should you still do an assessment, and how often?
Ultimately if your network’s not changing that frequently or at all, with an average lifespan of around four years, a good benchmark would be to say do it at the halfway point or the two-year mark, and if you want to be even more proactive, you could do one every year.
Being More Proactive
So, with today’s monitoring tools, we’re able to take a much more proactive and real-time approach to the management of not only our network but the user experience as well.
We’re able to establish a baseline of performance through historical data and have much greater visibility into what’s actually happening on the network.
So, through the use of software and real-time data that are being pulled from your infrastructure and your end-users, you’re able to be much more proactive and actually solve those smaller issues before they ever impact the network and your users.
Should anything larger or more complex arise, you can always turn to a WiFi performance assessment to solve those issues.
Recap and Next Steps
So, if your company is doing a lot of major changes to the network or your infrastructure, to the business applications that you use or the devices that are being found in your environment, you are probably going to be doing several performance assessments per year.
On the flip side, if your company is not doing frequent changes, then every one to two years is probably a good baseline or as problems arise.
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If you’re looking for more detailed information about assessments and site surveys, I recommend following the links that we have provided in the description down below.
Thanks for watching, and we will see you in the next video.
