If you are responsible for wireless networks, either as an MSP or as a property owner/manager, you will be familiar with the plaintive cry of “the WiFi’s down”.
During a recent Facebook outage, which occurred in the middle of the petrol crisis, a caller to a radio show insisted that not having access to Facebook was far worse than not having petrol.
For the petrol crisis, we soon had ministers on the news explaining that, actually, there was plenty of petrol, but that it was just in the wrong place, and the closed forecourts were the fault of panic buying by the general public.
The same happens with “the WiFi”.
When we get a cry of “The WiFi is down” or “slow”, it is possible, even likely, that there is nothing wrong with “The WiFi” at all, but the problem lies with some of the bits that non-technical people would conflate with “the WiFi:”. The internet connection, DNS, DHCP, the end device or an internet service. For example… Facebook could be down!
If only those complaining did so with better knowledge.
What if the call to the help desk came from a device that monitors the network 24/7 and which told you:
Hi. My Mac address is xx My IP address is yy. I connected to the SSID zz in location aa, at 9.15 this morning. I had a signal strength of -53 dBi. a download speed of 57Mb/s and an upload of 13Mb/s, but Facebook took ages to load.
And, by the way, the DHCP response is slow – have a look!
This is precisely what you do get with the user experience tool from one of our key vendors, Kubicon. The user experience monitoring tool consists of a web portal and sensors that are so cost-effective that they can be deployed throughout an organization. It provides in-depth, detailed visibility of wireless, network services and application services from the end-user perspective and provides alerts and reports that enable you to troubleshoot and monitor user experience over time.
The monitoring solution covers both WiFi and WAN performance including:
Wireless
- Signal Strength
- Bitrate
- Packet retries
- MCS Rates
- Channel width
Network Services
- DHCP Responsiveness
- DHCP IP Address allocation
- DNS Performance
- Upload and Download Bandwidths
- Captive Portal Performance
- Dropbox Performance
- ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol) reachability
Kubicon
The Kubicon WiFi monitoring solution is ideal for companies that offer guest WiFi including hotels, venues, airports and shopping centres. The system is also a perfect monitoring tool for office complexes and businesses providing WiFi for staff and guests.
For more information about Kubicon, and to arrange a free demonstration, why not get in touch, or see more about the solution.