Written by: Rob George, Senior Solutions Architect at SolutionInc.
“It’s not what you have but what you do with what you have.” ~ Amartyá Sen, Economist
So as we (eventually) return to our places of work, connectivity will be more important than ever. With the expanded use of online services and collaboration tools, is your network ready? Anticipating this ‘new normal’ will help put you ahead of the curve and get your co-workers and customers back to business, and so we’ve included a few suggestions below that you can do now to prepare.
A common situation we see with deployed Wi-Fi networks is they are operational, but are not tuned or optimized for the business environment. This means your WiFi network may not be operating at its full capacity and capabilities, causing operational headaches that you may not even realize.
- Check your network settings. Too often Wi-Fi settings are left at ‘default’ values. These almost never suite your environment or provide you with the best quality of service. The auto-configuration settings provided by the Wi-Fi vendors gets you part of the way there but does not factor in your client devices, applications, AP placements or your building environment. Looking at your WiFi power levels, channel width (especially in the 5GHz band) and channel assignments may help you uncover some conditions where your Wi-Fi can be improved.
- Research recommendations. There are many sources available to help you understand and identify the operational state of your Wi-Fi network. Most Wi-Fi vendors offer blogs and knowledge bases on how to optimize their systems. Additionally you can look to industry sources, such as WLAN Pros, Wireless Broadband Alliance, Certified Wireless Network Professional (CWNP) and other subject matter experts (http://www.revolutionwifi.net/, https://www.cleartosend.net/, https://clients.mikealbano.com/) to really learn and understand how to get the most out of your Wi-Fi.
- Leverage experts to optimize your network by researching and talking with companies that offer site services to help your business. We at SolutionInc have helped many companies and businesses to first understand how their staff and applications really need to use their Wi-Fi network, which helps us to identify and optimize the Wi-Fi to support these objectives and thus improve Wi-Fi performance, quality and staff productivity. We at SolutionInc are vendor agnostic so we believe in providing recommendations that best suit the business objectives of the organization. We genuinely want your business to succeed and know that we will be able to assist you with your optimizations.
Let us help you identify and optimize you Wi-Fi for ‘the new normal’.