Tuesday, February 24, 2015

The Challenges of the Low-End Enterprise for Wi-Fi

The video of my 12 minute "Ten Talk" from the 2015 Wireless LAN Professional's Conference on the Challenges of the Low-End Enterprise for Wi-Fi is available online:

http://www.wlanpros.com/videos/jason-hintersteiner-challenges-of-low-end-enterprise-market/

The key messages from this talk are as follows:
  • Most non-residential networks are in the low-end enterprise market (small and medium businesses) - this is a segment that is growing tremendously but is largely ignored by WLAN professionals
  • Most enterprise solutions are not geared towards this segment - both too expensive and too complex
  • Many of the challenges in the low-end enterprise market are similar to larger enterprises
  • The tools used to deploy Wi-Fi in the low-end enterprise are more limited:
    • Generally no site surveys except sometimes for predictive models
    • Site walk-throughs are generally only concerned with where you can run cables
    • Packet analysis never happens
  • Most Wi-Fi problems come down to the four degrees of freedom
    • Number and placement of APs
    • Antenna
    • Channel 
    • Power
  • You are designing for tomorrow, not today:  the infrastructure stays static while the expectation for the number of devices and the amount of data per device is increasing exponentially
  • BYOD and IoT:  2.4 GHz will unfortunately be with us for a long time
  • Cabling infrastructure is key 
I've been invited to give an hour long version of this talk at the CWNP conference in San Francisco in September 2015, so I'll be expanding on all of these topics.  

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