Enhancing Productivity with Efficient Wi-Fi Deployment

Efficient Wi-Fi Installation

The wireless networking revolution has happened so quickly and so seamlessly that one can barely say when it started and when we passed the tipping point. Only four years ago, in 2013, we were in awe at the fact that the number of mobile devices on Earth had just surpassed the number of people on Earth. In 2016, there were more than 40 million public hotspots in Western Europe alone (to put things into perspective, that means less than ten people for each hotspot!), and Gartner expects that, by next year, “40 percent of enterprises will specify Wi-Fi as the default connection for devices, such as desktops, desk phones, projectors, conference rooms.”

This is not a coincidence: enterprises are not moving to Wi-Fi networks for end-users because it is trendy, but because it is more productive. A comprehensive survey conducted by Cisco, the leading networking equipment manufacturer, has shown that BYOD alone, which is one of the primary drivers behind the move to a Wi-Fi first approach to end-user networking, reduces hardware and maintenance costs and can significantly increase employee productivity.

The sharp rise in Wi-Fi deployment has also radically altered the way company networks are planned and implemented. The backbone of networks that use Wi-Fi for user access is a high-performance wired network, since the aggregated traffic of the dozens or hundreds of access points in an office building requires massive bandwidth and high-speed network equipment. Consequently, even though end-users see fewer cables and less network equipment under their desks, the cable planning and deployment efforts are still significant.

However, the deployment of Wi-Fi networks as a main support for network activity, rather than just for additional coverage, as a perk or last resort, has given rise to an additional challenge: planning the deployment of wireless access points and equipment to guarantee a high level of performance throughout the office (and especially in the work and meeting areas), and to support the increased equipment and employee mobility. This process – known as Wi-Fi survey – is specific to wireless networks, which have to cope with the additional mobility that they facilitate and with the high expectations in terms of coverage and availability. The fact that users can move more freely around the office means that the number of users that an access point needs to service can vary dramatically, and that sections of the office that a wired-only network would not have covered now need to be covered by the Wi-Fi network.

Productivity is one of the main reasons for BYOD adoption; according to a survey made by Cisco as part of the study we mentioned above, almost 60% of laptop users and 45% of smartphone users manage to get more work done on their own laptops. BYOD has inherently led to a radical growth in the number and diversity of work devices, a growth that has proven to be almost impossible to manage for traditional, wired-only networks.

High-performance Wi-Fi network access drives productivity not only by facilitating BYOD but also by facilitating mobility and collaboration. In a properly-planned network, there is no limit to the number of people who can efficiently access their email and client data in a meeting room, or to the number of employees who can carry out their work in an open-floor office. This allows people to exchange ideas freely, as they are no longer “tied” to their desks or encumbered by slow meeting room connections.

Finally, deploying a Wi-Fi network for the user-facing section of a company’s network significantly reduces maintenance costs by eliminating the need to manage and troubleshoot the last – and, traditionally, the most cumbersome – segment of cabling between the end-user and the company network. Cables are a notorious source of workplace accidents (so notorious that the use of cable protectors has been compulsory in the UK for almost ten years, through the Health & Safety Offences Act in 2008), and difficult to troubleshoot, since they tend to fail intermittently for weeks or months before they finally stop working for good.

 Designing and Deploying High-Performance Wi-Fi Networks

The improved accessibility and efficiency of wireless networks have shaped the modern London office – a place that we think of as high-paced and dynamic. The buzzing interaction in the modern UK workplace is uniform and widespread, not confined to a few meeting rooms and executive offices. However, this also means that the driving factors behind it – including Wi-Fi networks – need to be present everywhere. In particular, a company’s Wi-Fi network needs to offer consistent and predictable performance. More to the point: we no longer deploy Wi-Fi networks just for coverage – we deploy them as critical elements of infrastructure, and the performance bar is no longer just “getting a signal anywhere in the office”.

The cornerstone of modern Wi-Fi network design is the Wi-Fi survey. The Wi-Fi survey is the most critical piece of the design process, much like network planning is critical for mobile telecom operators: the principle is the same, only the scale is different.

Simply put, the Wi-Fi survey is a process where the end user’s requirements are matched against the physical layout of the office and against the expected device density and mobility requirements. Through inspection and measurements, analysts work out an understanding of how RF signals will propagate, degrade and cover a work area, and use this understanding to plan how, where and in what number wireless access points and routers need to be deployed.

Without a Wi-Fi survey, one can only make a (largely uninformed) guess about how wireless access points need to be deployed. For small offices, no larger than one or two rooms and barely any visitors, a good guess is easy, but this is not the case for larger networks. Radio frequency (RF) signals in the GHz range have a very surprising behaviour: depending on the position of the antenna, they scatter against some objects, but bounce right off of others. They partly bounce off walls, partly pass through them, in ways that depend on the wall’s thickness and material. All these parameters affect the bandwidth, latency and capacity of a wireless network. It is impossible to make quantitative choices – how many access points to deploy and where, how many devices they can support, etc. – without quantitative data on these phenomena, and this data can only be obtained through a Wi-Fi survey.

In other words, the data obtained through a Wi-Fi survey is what allows the engineers to design a network that will meet the customer’s requirements in terms of coverage (which areas are properly covered), capacity (how many devices can be serviced in each area) and redundancy (continued operation even if some of the access points go down). The Wi-Fi survey is especially important in designs where the same area is covered by several related networks – for instance, when a company wishes to maintain separate wireless networks for employees and visitors, in order to segregate traffic for additional security.