Wireless Networking Terms And Concepts (INFOGRAPHIC)

 To take advantage of FREE assistance to engineer and design a solution for your organization’s network requirements (Wired, Wireless, Fiber, 5G, Cloud, SDWAN, IoT/IIoT, WAN/LAN,) .... including network security .... simply click on this link and ask. It’s as easy as 1, 2, 3.

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How To Configure Wireless LAN's (VIDEO)

In this lab for day 58 of Jeremy's IT Lab free CCNA 200-31 complete course, you will learn how to configure wireless LANs on a Cisco Wireless LAN Controller.

To take advantage of FREE assistance to engineer and design a solution for your organization’s network requirements (Wired, Wireless, Fiber, 5G, Cloud, SDWAN, IoT/IIoT, WAN/LAN,) .... including network security .... simply click on this link and ask. It’s as easy as 1, 2, 3.

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Fundamentals Of Wireless LAN Configuration (VIDEO)

In Day 58 of this free CCNA 200-301 complete course, you will learn about the fundamentals of wireless LAN configuration using a cisco Wireless LAN Controller.

To take advantage of FREE assistance to engineer and design a solution for your organization’s network requirements (Wired, Wireless, Fiber, 5G, Cloud, SDWAN, IoT/IIoT, WAN/LAN,) .... including network security .... simply click on this link and ask. It’s as easy as 1, 2, 3.

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The Fundamentals Of Wireless Security (VIDEO)

In Day 57 of this free CCNA 200-301 complete course, you will learn about the fundamentals of wireless security, such as authentication, encryption, and integrity.

To take advantage of FREE assistance to engineer and design a solution for your organization’s network requirements (Wired, Wireless, Fiber, 5G, Cloud, SDWAN, IoT/IIoT, WAN/LAN,) .... including network security .... simply click on this link and ask. It’s as easy as 1, 2, 3.

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Fundamentals Of Wireless Architectures (VIDEO)

In Day 56 of this free CCNA 200-301 complete course, you will learn about the fundamentals of wireless architectures, including autonomous, lightweight, and cloud-based APs.

To take advantage of FREE assistance to engineer and design a solution for your organization’s network requirements (Wired, Wireless, Fiber, 5G, Cloud, SDWAN, IoT/IIoT, WAN/LAN,) .... including network security .... simply click on this link and ask. It’s as easy as 1, 2, 3.

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The Fundamentals Of Wireless LANs (VIDEO)

In Day 55 of this free CCNA 200-301 complete course, you will learn about the fundamentals about wireless LANs, such as Wi-Fi standards, radio frequency, and the various service sets.

To take advantage of FREE assistance to engineer and design a solution for your organization’s network requirements (Wired, Wireless, Fiber, 5G, Cloud, SDWAN, IoT/IIoT, WAN/LAN,) .... including network security .... simply click on this link and ask. It’s as easy as 1, 2, 3.

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Wireless Network Design Do's And Don'ts Of WiFi Planning (VIDEO)

 Cerdant Network Engineering team manager, Sam Sexton, provides valuable information in this video on laying the appropriate groundwork for a strong and reliable wireless network and how to make sure you're scaling for the future. The discussion focuses on the do's and don'ts of wireless network planning and how to properly use the tools at your disposal.

For FREE assistance with network design and sourcing (wired and wireless) .... including comparing 100s of ethernet/fiber and wireless providers to ensure you choose the right one for your needs .... simply ask us at the link below.

Wireless Network Design And Sourcing

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High-Density Wi-Fi Design Part 3 - WLAN Configuration Best Practices (VIDEO)

 This video explains the best practices for configuring a Wi-Fi network for high-density environments.

These include:

- Proper encryption required to use 802.11n high throughput data rates

- Proper use of Quality of Service (QoS) through Wi-Fi Multimedia (WMM)

- Disabling lower data rates to maintain high performance

- Prioritizing key business applications over recreational applications

- Client rate-limiting to prevent "greedy" clients from hogging bandwidth

- The important role that bi-directional band steering plays in optimizing spectral use

- Load balancing clients based on airtime utilization on different channels to serve users where the most capacity exists

- Using airtime fairness to adequately handle a mixed-client environment

- Proper consideration of wired network resources, including switch port bandwidth, power over Ethernet, and Internet/WAN bandwidth

- Appropriately sizing IP subnets to account for device density and user mobility

For FREE assistance with network design and sourcing (wired and wireless) .... including comparing 100s of ethernet/fiber and wireless providers to ensure you choose the right one for your needs .... simply ask us at the link below.

Wireless Network Design And Sourcing

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High-Density Wi-Fi Design Part 2 - RF Planning (VIDEO)

 This video explains the key RF principles that you should consider when designing a high-density Wi-Fi network.

These include:

- Leveraging the 5 GHz bands for to reduce co-channel interference and increase network capacity

- Appropriate use of 20 MHz versus 40 MHz channel width

- Using non-adjacent channels to minimize adjacent channel interference

- Always performing a pre-deployment site survey

- Appropriate cell sizing to maintain high data rates for clients while minimizing co-channel interference

- Ensuring a high quality bi-directional link with clients

- Leveraging facility obstructions for channel re-use

- Co-locating APs to increase capacity

- Alternative AP mounting methods and appropriate use of antennas to achieve desired coverage while minimizing co-channel interference

For FREE assistance with network design and sourcing (wired and wireless) .... including comparing 100s of ethernet/fiber and wireless providers to ensure you choose the right one for your needs .... simply ask us at the link below.

Wireless Network Design And Sourcing

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High-Density Wi-Fi Design Part 1 - Forecasting AP Capacity (VIDEO)

 The key to supporting increased demand on the WLAN is to design the network for capacity rather than simply coverage.

The first step in designing a WLAN to meet capacity demands is to perform adequate requirements gathering. This starts with a proper understanding of client device capabilities. Because RF is a shared environment, the capacity is determined by the capabilities of the AP infrastructure and the client devices, application bandwidth requirements, and the resulting airtime utilization that results from their unique combination.

In this first of three videos on high-density Wi-Fi design, I describe how these variables interact and can be used to derive a preliminary forecast of the required AP capacity to support the intended network load. These principles are valid for any WLAN deployment with any vendor's equipment. I also walk through a few examples to highlight how to apply this method to both homogenous and heterogeneous client environments.

For FREE assistance with network design and sourcing (wired and wireless) .... including comparing 100s of ethernet/fiber and wireless providers to ensure you choose the right one for your needs .... simply ask us at the link below.

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Insights On Designing A Wireless Network For Your Business

 If you assemble 200 Wi-Fi experts in one room, you will most likely get 200 different opinions about proper Wi-Fi design for coverage, capacity, and airtime consumption. However, experienced WLAN professionals will all agree about the importance and value of a properly designed wireless network. The bulk of troubleshooting calls will be prevented if a WLAN is well-planned and designed prior to deployment. Although crucial, a plan for adequate Wi-Fi coverage is only one aspect of WLAN design. A good design must also take into consideration user and wireless device capacity to ensure performance needs. Just as important is a post-deployment validation survey to verify the planned wireless network blueprint. This session discusses the top Wi-Fi design concepts that every wireless network administrator should grasp.

To take advantage of FREE assistance to engineer and design a WiFi network solution for your organization’s network requirements....including a comparison of available providers with rate quotes (with a low price guarantee)....simply click on this link and ask. It’s as easy as 1, 2, 3.

Wireless Network Design Resource

WiFi For A Hotel .... What To Think About

First, the hotel's WiFi strategy needs to be finalized, and following this you would know where the service needs to be available, if it will be free, if it will be solely used for guest browsing, or if it will also facilitate value added services to the hotel itself .... such as wireless point-of-sale, wireless security, wireless signage, wireless VoIP on the compound, etc. There are a plethora of resources online that you can check for the technicalities of some of these types of equipment - this is not a challenge.

After this, everything begins with an on-site survey to determine the layout of the hotel, and placement of the access points. This should include RF mapping for larger properties (or any property for that matter, since it removes alot of the guesswork).

Bearing in mind you're working with a budget, you need to let that budget dictate the type of equipment you're going to use. From Access points & routers, to POE switches, packet shaping & filtering, to billing & authentication platforms. Or whether you're going to do it all with a cheap and simple Dlink setup, complete with login ticket printers. There are a multitude of different architectures for these networks.

You will also need to agree upon work schedules with the Hotel Management, because they may not want technicians and engineers visible throughout the compound while guests are enjoying their stay there. This can lengthen or shorten the duration of the project (depending on what Hotel Management decides) and can have direct effects on project cost. All of which needs to be presented to Hotel management in different scenarios.

One of the make-or-break details that often get overlooked is the available bandwidth being piped into the hotel to feed this Wireless network, and depending on the size of the hotel, it needs to be considerable. I'd suggest Ethernet or fiber if you can get it.

Once you've done a simple traffic analysis to quantify bandwidth requirements, based on information from the hotel such as average room occupancy percentages throughout the year, you can determine what is required. Once you can get this required bandwidth from a service provider, you're golden. Whether or not the budget allows, you should always push the Hotel to choose a corporate data package with an service level agreement (SLA) attached to it, so as to guarantee uptime for the guests. This is critical if the hotel has a high percentage of business travellers.

For assistance in finding just the right bandwidth solution ... at best price .... I recommend using the free services at FreedomFire Communications.

Once the physical aspects of the network is in place and everything has been neatly tucked away, you need to develop a nice walled garden for the hotel - although this is something the larger hotels normally do, for branding and marketing purposes. However, this is an additional step that needs to be done, whether or not it is your responsibility. This can facilitate something as simple as the logon splash screen, or it can offer more interactivity based on the tech savviness of the hotel.

Finally, this can be as simple or as complex as the hotel and their budget requires, but even in the most complex scenario it really is quite simple and is one of the easier wireless implementations to deploy.

The Evolution Of Cable

THINGS YOU DIDN’T KNOW CABLE COULD DO

We all know the price per meg in bandwidth has been declining over the years. Back in 2012, price per meg was just a little over $4 but when you look at 2017, you will notice that we are down below $2 per meg. That is an over 50% decrease! So, what do agents do to counter the price compression in coax? It is important to remember that customers need more bandwidth and that there are also other technologies you can sell them. You’ve probably heard the word DOCSIS thrown around, DOCSIS is what cable providers use for their coax networks. It is the underlying technology that allows them to do what they do over that coax medium. If you look at the image below, back in 1997 when DOCSIS 1.0 came out, it was 40 Mbps downstream and 10 Mbps upstream. This revolutionized the game, and the coax providers started to become relevant at that point. Today there is new technology being deployed that is pushing broadband speeds into eh 10G realm, both downstream and upstream.

Cable television started back in 1948, and gradually this grew immensely, by 1980 there were 16 million subscribers. By the 2000s the cable companies looked at the market and realized businesses also needed other technologies such as on-demand programing, high-speed internet and, cable phone service.

While the price per meg keeps deteriorating, the amount of bandwidth that the cable companies can provide is skyrocketing thanks to DOCSIS 3.1. This is changing the way businesses use the cloud. Just because we’re able to throw a lot of bandwidth at the cloud doesn’t mean it will work or work well. Although there are weaknesses in coax performance, these weaknesses can be used to upsell additional products that most agents ignore. Here are a few examples of how you can turn a weakness into and opportunity:

Weakness 1: Increased speed does NOT fix quality issues

Just because there is a lot of throughput on a coax line, it doesn’t mean all the packets arrive quickly. It also doesn’t mean that all of the packets will arrive at all. It is still an over-subscribed, best-effort, non-SLA service. Applications like voice and video are incredibly sensitive to latency and packet loss.

Opportunity 1: SD-WAN cleans up coax performance

SD-WAN uses redundancy and error-correction to restore packets that could be lost, and it finds a quicker path to the cloud (like WAZE) when it needs to. There is no static routing table “telling” the router what to do; it’s making decisions on its own to protect the outcome which is near 100 percent data transmission with minimal latency.

Weakness 2: Coax is prone to outages

Coax lines experience outages at a higher rate than fiber, T1, and other methods. In business, outages cost a lot of money.

Opportunity 2: Auto-failover protects the connection and adds MRC

Comcast specifically has a great product called, Comcast Business Connection Pro. Normally, in a Comcast circuit you get the primary router for an extra cost of $29.95, and the customer can put in a second backup router which the primary router connects to. You can use this in conjunction with SD-WAN.

Weakness 3: Coax is built for sharing but most people aren’t good at marketing

Coax lines are ideal for retail stores that want to attract patrons and keep them there for as long as possible.

Opportunity 3: Turn WiFi into a Marketing Tool

The easy to configure guest WiFi can be turned into a marketing tool. The Comcast WiFi Pro option provides this ability; it is a $19.95 per month upsell that takes some of the burdens off the customer.

Opportunity 4: Video Monitoring Solutions

Traditionally a customer might not think of their cable company as someone that can provide video monitoring. Comcast has a great product called Comcast Business SmartOffice, for $29.95 per month they will add a camera to give their customer some visibility into their store.

ADDING IT ALL UP

If you take a look at all of the easy add-ons that Comcast (Cox and soon Spectrum) offers, it’s an absolute sin to leave all of this money on the table. Most of your customers are ordering all of these things from other places, with coax you have the chance to win all of the business and simplify all of these services into one bill for you.

To learn more and request a free quote simply ask here:

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How To Monetize Your Business WiFi

No matter what your business is, if you offer free WiFi to guests or customers it doesn’t have to be a bottomless hole of costs with little or no return.  You can still offer free wireless network access while monetizing the WiFi network to even turn a profit.  This strategy is especially attractive to those in the hospitality, retail, and travel industries...for example hotels, resorts, restaurants, coffee shops, wineries, breweries, airports, and shopping malls.

Here's how Sprint Business Wi-Fi can help you transform your guest/customer Wi-Fi from a cost burden into a revenue-generating platform.  

MULTIPLE LOGIN OPTIONS 

Sprint is a tier one global provider with an all IP next-generation network; they do everything from MPLS, DIA, SD-WAN, and UC. Sprint’s business Wi-Fi has been around for a long time, and it provides a unique solution on the guest side. It provides the capability to break up the corporate from the guest Wi-Fi while keeping the security and firewalls in place, but it also provides some unique features and abilities. This includes content marketing and also lets you collect data analytics from those users that are logging into the guest Wi-Fi. In the image below, you can view the splash page of what a user would see when they log in to the guest Wi-Fi. This splash page is easily customizable through a cloud-based portal that works through jpg drag-and-drop. This portal doesn’t require any HTML coding.

                                                                                                                                              

Below you can also view an example of the welcome page a user would see when they log in. This is easily customizable as well. 

DEVICE AND USER DETAILS 

Sprint’s business Wi-Fi allows you to collect data analytics from users who log in to the guest Wi-Fi. This provides everything from name, age, gender, email, birthday, education history, etc. Basically, anything that the user has on their social media profile will be captured. It also captures things such as when they visit and how long they stay along with other IT information like the type of device they are using and their IP address. Sprint can also enable content delivery and advertisements through an easy-to-use workflow that’s cloud-based. This includes static banner ads that overlay on top of any web browser; it can be a clickable link or just an advertisement. Another unique feature is being able to provide video advertising over the content delivery which can happen when they first log in. The targeted advertising can also be based on the demographic information that is captured through the social media assignments. 

DISCOVER AND MANAGE ALL CONNECTED DEVICES 

Another way you can enable your organization to monetize their guest Wi-Fi is through the actual broadband delivery. When the guest’s login they can be given a speed rate limit of whatever your customer wants it to be. They can also give the option for the guests to pay for faster speed in case they want to stream Netflix or anything like that, this can be done through the captive portal.  Sprint’s business Wi-Fi also allows a lot more control; your organization can now define speeds for all the users.  

To get free quotes and network design help simply ask us here....

Monetize Your Business WiFi

Key Benefits Of A Fully Managed Wi-Fi Solution

The rapid rise of new disruptive technology trends - cloud, social media and mobility -has added a new dimension to business operations. Connectivity is now the most critical factor for running a competitive business. How will businesses support these devices? Turning to cloud-based Wi-Fi providers is one way. With an outsourced wireless solution, you can overcome many of the challenges of providing access to an ever-increasing number of mobile devices while keeping pace with wireless technology advances.

Wi-Fi providers that offer a hosted, cloud-based WLAN serve a wide range of businesses. Migrating to an outsourced model for wireless network management makes sense for any company that needs to provide wireless. Let's understand a few benefits of a fully managed Wi-Fi solution:

Geographically Dispersed Locations

The traditional wireless network uses a physical hardware controller to direct access points. However, if your business operations are distributed across locations, the traditional controller-based configuration is less desirable. In a cloud-based model, wireless LAN services enable plug-and-play capability for devices across all locations.

Ease of Business

The first and the most noticeable benefit of outsourcing WLAN management is the hassle-free access to connectivity. The IT team no longer needs to deal with the stress of network downtime and constant demands for accessibility from users spread across the company.

The entire WLAN ecosystem is managed by the technology partner, who takes care of all the Wi-Fi requirements of the company - from analyzing enterprise requirements, designing and installing a customized WLAN system to day-to-day management and operations of the system.

Risk management

Mitigating risk is important in all areas of business, and managing a Wi-Fi network should be no different. All businesses are concerned with addressing consumer privacy; however, there are unique considerations that must be addressed as they relate to the Internet. Consumer privacy expectations are an important topic in today's news. It is considered a best practice in implementing public Wi-Fi, so that a user must agree to a Terms of Service (ToS) that usually incorporates an Acceptable Use Policy (AUP). This opens them to a serious risk.

Customer engagement

Managed Wi-Fi offers business owners another way to reach their customers. Videos, promotions, surveys, and other types of content can be displayed on the page customers see when they connect to the network, serving as a digital engagement tool for a business to deliver messages. One of the biggest benefits a business receives by offering public Wi-Fi is the potential to develop deeper relationships with customers and the capacity to improve its understanding of customer interests.

Complete visibility

With a fully managed wireless network, companies gain an unprecedented level of visibility and control over the entire network. A cloud based centralized WLAN monitoring dashboard provides deep visibility of the entire WLAN infrastructure and provides application-level and user level control. Managers can control Wi-Fi usage by app category and make quick decisions with weekly or monthly reports.

Dynamic scalability

Managed WLAN services have the added advantage of being highly scalable. Organizations can rely on rapid provisioning and deployment of additional WLAN nodes to match sudden workload spikes.

IT Staffing Constraints

Many companies, especially small- and medium-sized businesses, have insufficient in-house IT resources to manage robust wireless networks. Yet, all businesses must embrace mobility to remain competitive. Service providers can provide the solution you need with access to advanced technology, tools and expertise. If you don't have sufficient in-house IT resources, you're still able to leverage critical mobility capabilities. If you do have in-house IT staff, you can refocus their efforts on other projects.

Growing Operations

A major benefit of working with service providers is the ability to scale your WLAN solution as your business grows. When network demands increase, your managed WLAN solution can scale accordingly. The ability to scale is especially critical for organizations that can't always predict demand, such as when internal staff and outside visitors require network resources for their own devices. Examples include educational institutions, health care facilities, hospitality companies, retail operations and any organization trying to manage unpredictable demand.

The last few years have seen the corporate work culture changing drastically. Employees no longer sit for hours in front of their desktops; mobile devices and laptops allow people to move freely and work from anywhere in the building. This dynamic work culture is perfect for enhancing teamwork and nurturing innovation and an enhanced WLAN ecosystem is an essential component of this new work environment.

By Saumya Sinha