The customer was experiencing poor Wi-Fi performance in three offices at various European locations. The issues included: low data rates, connection drops, low video calls quality, problems with accessing the Wi-Fi network, and missing Access-Points (APs).
Client:
Global eCommerce company
Implemented services:
Technical Consulting
Wireless Site Survey
Wi-Fi Audit
Engagement:
Two wireless engineers
Site survey
Audit plan
After the initial contact from the customer, who detailed the problem, we proposed to conduct a thorough audit of the Wi-Fi network to verify: the performance, installation, and configuration of the current setup. Based on the current situation and found issues, the target was to provide a list of suggested improvements.
Service preparation (1 day, remote):
Q&A with the customer’s IT operations manager at each location to gather information on the particular issues experienced by the end-users.
Audit of the wireless controller to collect information on the setup, configuration, and issues.
On-site service (1 day, on-site):
Site survey with active (throughput, delay) and passive (coverage, SNR, channel overlap) measurements.
On-site AP mounting and location verification.
Live performance troubleshooting in the wireless controller.
Audit summary part (2 days, remote):
Analyzing all the information and report preparation which included found issues and suggestions for improvements.
Planning of the new AP location.
Sample audit report
Troubleshooting Client’s Wi-Fi – recommendations
Audit for each of the locations took 4 days.
Each of the Wi-Fi networks at the customer’s site had 30+ APs and served 200+ users.
Some of the found issues included:
bad mounting of some APs,
not-optimal AP location,
using 2.4 GHz for dense-network,
the too low number of APs in areas where there are a lot of users,
wrongly configured radio resource management algorithms,
too high transmit power for APs.
Some of the suggested improvements included:
switching-off 2.4 GHz band, and use it only where/when needed;
changing the location of the APs – move them to central locations and close to where the users are;
changing mounting of the APs – to decrease disturbance from the metal elements;
decreasing transmit power – to decrease overshooting;
using dedicated APs for conference rooms and separate for open spaces;
decreasing the number of SSIDs to the minimum – to save the “air-time”.
Summary
The customer’s IT team changed AP location according to the new plan, corrected mounting of the APs, adjusted wireless parameters (like bandwidth, transmit power available channels), and tuned radio-resource management algorithms. The performance of the network was improved: lower call-drop rates, higher data rates per end-user, and higher quality of the video calls.
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