Wi-fi tips

1. Professional design

Professional design is recommended for professional environments, for example:

– premises with public spaces such as hotels, stadia, colleges, libraries, and shopping centres

– pharmaceutical, manufacturing plants and business campuses would ideally have a Wi-Fi network professionally designed, installed at build/kit out stage, or after renovations.

Avoid issues and frustrations by planning ahead and maintaining the system regularly.

Plan, validate, troubleshoot & monitoring with SenSys Technology by focussing on the following:

• Predictive wireless access point Wi-Fi designs
• Pre-deployment site surveys
• Installation and Configuration
• Post deployment site surveys
• Signal strength analysis – for redundancy and roaming purposes
• Signal to noise ration analysis for quality and data rates
• Spectrum measurements for interference issues
• Channel quality analysis
• Connectivity analysis – monitor roaming behaviour
• Packet analysis
• Periodic check-ups and preventative maintenance with SenSys CARE and Monitoring

Specific needs

Purpose – Is your premises used for manufacturing, hospitality, retail or office? Each will have it’s own criteria and goals to be addressed in design and placement of wireless access point solutions.

Goals will be related to:

• Coverage – infrastructure placement and configuration
• Capacity planning – to serve devices (such as laptops, phones, tablets). Understanding the needs of your team and guests
• Quality – dependant on the construction of premises
• Density planning for the placement of access points
• Load validation & troubleshooting
• Positive experience – particularly important for hospitality sector
• Cope with large numbers and usages – venues & stadia.
• Security – importance of firewalls
• Ease of maintenance – we recommend cloud managed systems

1. Reduce channel overlap

Reduce Channel Overlap by strategic access point AP placement:

How does the placement of access points in general effect the performance?

The enemy of Wi-Fi is not microwave ovens or Bluetooth. It is your own Wi-Fi. Access points conflicting with each other by being placed too close together – having AP’s hearing another AP causing co-channel interference which the worse enemy of Wi-Fi.

Whenever possible take the AP’s out of hallways and place them in the rooms or offices, we appreciate this isn’t always possible but whenever possible this is best practice. So, adding access points isn’t always better and if you do not have free channels in fact adding access points will reduce the throughput of your network.

1. Avoid interference

The team at SenSys Wi-Fi use Ekahau analysis to detect interference in order to combat against the interference. Interfere with Wi-Fi can be caused by:

• Bluetooth
• Radio
• Cordless Phones
• Wireless Cameras
• GSM Networks
• Microwave Ovens

There are tools that SenSys Technology use to fix interference

• Many access points have a spectrum analyser built in.
• Ekahau sidekick site survey tool
• Wi-Fi analysis should be carried out by a SenSys Wi-Fi architect and we will be happy to help.

Use the best blueprints

Blueprint Quality has a direct correlation with Wi-Fi design efficiency:

If you can provide CAD quality drawings to use with our professional Wi-Fi design tools and software, it will increase design accuracy while reducing cost. All design hours are valuable and if it saves the Wi-Fi architect time ‘drawings walls and scaling buildings in software’ it will make design time much more efficient with the result of a more accurate design.

Seek expert advice

Speak to the Wi-Fi and Network Experts at SenSys Wi-Fi about designing, upgrading or maintaining the right system for your requirements.