In recent years, Ekahau – the gold standard in wireless design and coverage assessment hardware – has been expanding its target audience. Previously used by professional wireless consultants almost exclusively, today Ekahau products are marketed to businesses of all stripes. The promise is simple and compelling: License and learn Ekahau, and your IT team can assess, design, and troubleshoot onsite wireless coverage in-house, on its own.
Indeed, Ekahau can enable internal efforts in impactful ways. However, this shift is having an unexpected impact on one area: coverage assessments.
Historically one comprehensive engagement, coverage assessments are increasingly being split into two parts. Businesses are turning to organizations like Velaspan for the first part, commissioning us to come walk their facilities and collect raw data, usually because they lack the time or resources to do it themselves (data collection can span days and even weeks for larger facilities). From there, though, they’re opting to analyze the raw data on their own. Perceived value is the driving force. “We invested in Ekahau, so let’s outsource the time-consuming labor but lean on our own tools and know-how to make sense of it all.” On a spreadsheet this might make sense. In practice, it flies in the face of what Velaspan has learned from decades of experience:
The same team that collects raw data should be the one to analyze it.
Even more, that team should possess vast RF networking experience.
A single, authoritative point of view is imperative to understanding coverage for a few reasons:
1) Airtight analysis requires end-to-end RF expertise
Competent RF engineers like Velaspan’s make informed observations when walking physical spaces – observations not captured in raw data and therefore absent from interpretation when organizations analyze data in-house. Without these critical insights, businesses only have half the story.
Take irregular coverage patterns. These can result from a wide variety of factors, deliberate and otherwise, ranging from atypical-but-intentional hardware placement to flawed installation. Without a report that includes onsite observations, though, cause is lost because the person looking at the data has neither a firsthand understanding of the space nor an expert lens through which to view it. Velaspan engineers, by contrast, know what’s normal, can interpret design principles, understand dependencies in coverage and design, and smell a fish when something doesn’t look quite right. If we see something odd in raw data, our onsite observations in most cases help us make sense of it.
2) Tool expertise matters
No tool is perfect. Sometimes software draws inconsistent or even incorrect conclusions. The good news: Experts who use these tools day in and day out are equipped to spot and anticipate their shortcomings and anomalies.
Many of Velaspan’s engineers have worked with Ekahau since its inception. We know their tools like the back of our hands. Take Ekahau’s spectrum analysis function. It attempts to make educated guesses about interference sources based on patterns –– a process that often delivers false positives. Not only does Velaspan see these coming, but by mapping them to observations made onsite, we often spare clients days of effort spent chasing ghosts.
Put another way, Velaspan leans on tools rather than relying on them in full. And we’re fluent in platforms beyond Ekahau. AirMagnet, Sidos, Hamina, iBwave – we own and routinely use these and more, from the legacy options to those poised to disrupt the marketplace. There aren’t many scenarios that Velaspan hasn’t encountered with each of these products.
3) It makes the most of your spend
There’s a sad irony to clients tasking us to simply walk their facilities and collect raw data given our highest-value strength is interpreting, parsing, and acting on that same data. In these scenarios, they’re investing in Velaspan but leaving us out of the second part of the equation – the most important and nuanced half, requiring the greatest level of interdisciplinary expertise. When you enlist Velaspan to complete a coverage assessment in full, you work with engineers who view your space and its data through the lens of RF physics and thousands of use cases. It’s expertise that protects your time and investment by ensuring that you’ve got the whole story.
If you want insights that go beyond the raw data, our engineers are ready to help you see – and solve – what others miss.
