WLAN Channel Management F1 Style: Part 2 of 3

Part 2 of the mini-series. Today we will review the results and some details of the experiment. The University has an enterprise-grade WLAN from a Tier1 vendor. The overall amount of APs under test is 100 (plus up to 90 neighbouring APs not belonging to that network). They represent a portion of the bigger campus...

[WLAN] Motorola Solutions simplifies WING5 Licensing: free stuff

Is was around for a while, but now it's official. Motorola (Solutions) simplifies licensing for it's WING5 WLAN Platform. The following features are now free: Analytics This is the client analytics (mainly for Retail and hospitality industry) so many were talking about. Allows offering guest access services to customers to understand user behavior by gathering...

Wi-Fi Riddles: Strong signal = bad signal?

While I was working on the next part of the "Unobvious and overlooked Wi-Fi" (which is about channels), I got an interesting knowledge nugget from our engineering. We all know that there is a lower limit to receiver sensitivity, we all know that there must be some upper limit, after which the Rx signal is...

Running a WLAN controller in VMWare Player

Motorola WiNG5.6 firmware images were finally posted last week, and along them, the VX9000 cloud controller DEMO image. I am very excited about it, as it allows me to run a VM version of Motorola's top controller (or cluster, or hierarchy for that sake) right on my laptop! No need to say about potential for...

[Opinion] 2×2:2 MIMO in Smartphones

So, Broadcom announced a 2x2:2 (867Mbps) chip for mobile devices, which of course generated lots of excitement. Let's see: 867Mbps Wi-Fi, you say? Can you sustain such speed with your home Internet connection? Have you seen hotspots offering such a high-speed Internet? Do you have a RAID-enabled NAS at home for file transfers, since even...

Wi-Fi Riddles: Faster speeds require weaker signals?

A discussion of my previous post in the 802.11 Wireless professionals group lead to a discovery of a new bit of overlooked knowledge! Many thanks to Eduard Garcia-Villegas and Mike Rex, who turned my attention to this one. Ever wondered why faster rates have smaller effective distance? It was always attributed to signal fading - higher rates...

[Recommended] Wireless LAN Professionals Podcast

Just finished listening to http://www.wlanpros.com/wlw052-7-rules-accurate-site-surveys/ by Keith Parsons. Highly recommended - a very good summarisation of site survey lore: What do do on a site survey What not to do on a site survey How can others cheat on a site survey (= do not do it) Active vs Passive survey Spectrum analyzers And more...

Wi-Fi, the unobvious and overlooked: Power.

Everyone nowadays buys 'super-fast' 802.11n or 802.11ac APs, but not everyone manages to get super-fast connection with them. In this article we'll discuss the not-so-obvious or often overlooked nuances that can substantially improve (or impair) the Wi-Fi connection. Everything below is applicable both to small home networks with off-the-shelf consumer-grade routers using stock and advanced...