Then there are passive and active surveys that are done on site with a spectrum analyzer and walking the site. It is generally understood that a predictive survey is done "virtually" with a scale floor plan and software to "predict" the environment and help decide placement and channel planning based on the floor plan and some guesses about the building material properties like walls, windows and shelves, etc. I just want to clarify what a predictive survey is though. Are you running into bugs/config issues? A site survey won't fix everything that is wrong with wifi.Įkahau was already suggested and I agree and have it and use it. If you have a big room with lots of clients all needing fast speeds, they will likely be fine on signal strength, but will still have issues on just one AP. Yes, you should have a good survey and best practice is hitting something like -67 on 5ghz, but you also have to take into account customer/client needs. The last part is using site survey software to trouble shoot. My real survey's usually are pretty damn close to my prediction survey's with Ekahau. I personally think AP on stick surveys are a waste of time and money. Imagine a half million sqft warehouse slowly moving a AP on stand getting to the right height and then walking around it and getting accurate readings and then move it again, real world your looking at a week of solid work for a decent size building and it still might be off unless you know the people are experts. The problem with AP on a stick is I have seen it done incorrectly and they recorded the wrong signal or even if it is done correctly it takes a long time to do. I love the sideick with a tablet, so much better than a laptop and can walk around much longer without battery charging breaks for laptop.ĪP on a stick is technically the best way to do predictive survey because your actually testing in real world, the attenuation of the actual walls/obstructions and no virtual survey can predict if they used double wall drywall or steel beam hidden behind wood walls or whatever. Your looking at low 5 figures for everything for an employee or two with sidekick hardware and licensing. Ekahau isn't cheap but when you do 250k-500k projects it pays for itself with one project. If you put in the effort up front to get walls/distance/customer needs you can just hit the AI button and let it do it's thing 95% of the time and spit out the diagram. If you don't get the distance and walls into the floor plan correctly it will be a bad design. I’ve heard of a method where people put an access point on a stick and walk around with some software on a laptop to do a prediction survey, anyone know what that is and what equipment is needed etc?Įkahau has by far the most accurate virtual/prediction site survey's I have used, but it is also garbage in garbage out. So the point of my post is, do you have any recommendations of any software that is worth investing into for these purposes? I would like to test a few in our office and see what works best so I’m open to all recommendations. We want to start doing predictive surveys ourselves and installing the access points after evaluating the prediction survey to avoid the clutter on our support helpdesk and save our client some money. A lot of times we rely on third parties to do surveys which cost so much money or we swap Access Points one for one at the locations we’re onboarding, and most of the time the client does not want to spend a lot of money paying a third party for surveys so we end up with the latter which clutters up our support helpdesk with Wi-Fi tickets. I work for an MSP in the United States (East coast) and we do a lot of network overhauls for new clients during onboardings and install meraki Wi-Fi for most of our clients. Hi all, my first time posting here so I’m sorry if this is not the right place.
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