Our wireless-savvy experts use industry-leading VeriWave tools to assist you in optimizing your mission-critical wireless network (WLAN, WiMAX, etc.). Since 1995 we have been designing, building, evaluating, and optimizing large, complex wireless networks.
Our specialty is optimizing large, complex wireless networks to handle heavy loads under mixed-use conditions. Mixed-use refers to simultaneous traffic of many types, including web browsing (HTTP), email (SMTP), file transfers (FTP & SMB), voice (VOIP), streaming video & audio (e.g. MPEG-2), webcasting, and unclassified UDP traffic.
To simulate these real-life wireless-network loads, we use VeriWave tools. These are the same sophisticated, world-class, wireless-measurement tools that major wireless-equipment manufacturers use to design their advanced wireless products. These tools simulate heavier, more-complex traffic than you could possibly produce even if, somehow, you could simultaneously operate 150 laptops as wireless clients using diverse protocols.
Your wireless network has grown, but is it ready for heavy traffic when you need it most?
Why are you waiting for users to complain? By that time it's too late. You may have compromised healthcare services, lost a customer or client, upset students, or lost credibility with upper management.
Eliminate this risk now. Call MetaSkills Technical Services at 503-245-4190.
Perhaps you think your wireless network will just slow down a bit if it gets overloaded with mixed-use traffic. Not necessarily.
Wireless networks are vulnerable to dramatic drops in performance under many circumstances. These crippling circumstances are almost impossible to simulate using standard equipment. If they do occur, they are almost impossible to replicate, which means you can't be sure that your changes have fixed the problem.
VeriWave tools can simulate complex, mixed-load, heavy traffic. And they can replicate failed tests.
Our wireless-network experts know more that just how to use VeriWave's sophisticated tools. Our experts also understand wireless technology in ways that enable us to identify—and repeatably measure—weaknesses that can occur in wireless networks that have not yet been completely optimized.
To better understand your risk, consider the traffic on a freeway. You could calculate the freeway's traffic capacity by multiplying the number of lanes by the number of cars that pass when traffic is going at 55 miles per hour. Would this estimate meaningfully predict what happens during rush-hour traffic? Of course not.
Did you or your IT folks calculate your wireless network's traffic capacity in a similar way? Is this theoretical limit achievable? No. To begin with, it doesn't account for delays caused by wireless packet collisions.
Furthermore, it doesn't allow for latency delays. These delays are not critical during data transfers, but what happens when they occur during a wireless VOIP phone call or a video conference? The result could be a lost phone-number digit, missing images, or the loss of a short word (such as “not”) that unknowingly alters the meaning of an important sentence.
Our evaluation process meaningfully measures these traffic weaknesses, and our optimization recommendations clearly explain how your IT staff can eliminate these weaknesses in your wireless network. Of course we remain available to assist your IT staff if any questions arise. After our recommendations have been implemented, we can again measure the same traffic weaknesses to verify they have been eliminated, and further verify that performance now meets your needs.
Just adding more wireless access points won't necessarily improve peak-traffic performance. All aspects of the network interact in ways that may not be obvious. This is analogous to freeway engineers knowing that (inexpensively) adding traffic lights at freeway on-ramps can increase traffic flow just as effectively as (expensively) building new lanes of traffic.
Modern wireless technology offers strategic ways to improve client authentication and roaming, and such inexpensive changes could improve your network's performance under mixed-use, heavy loads. Because wireless-network interactions are complex, we recommend that after our recommendations have been implemented, we certify that the network can now perform to your specifications.
We can save you money. If you have already purchased your equipment, we can maximize its performance. That's our specialty, and no one does it better.
Better yet, if you get us involved at an early stage, we can recommend the most cost-efficient equipment choices. This approach saves you both time and money by recommending to your IT staff specific equipment purchases, parameter settings, antenna locations and orientations, and other choices that affect performance and reliability. With each access point costing as much as $1,000 to $2,000 and a large wireless network consisting of up to 500 (or more) access points, a lot of money is at stake.
As a further benefit of getting us involved early, we can ensure that your wireless network can grow in ways that optimize both performance and cost. This approach ensures scalability from the outset. The alternative could be discovering that your equipment choices don't accommodate your desires for expansion.
The sooner we get involved, the more money we can save your organization. So call MetaSkills Technical Services now at 503-245-4190.
Ultimately the most important characteristic of a wireless network is user satisfaction. We estimate user satisfaction by measuring specific characteristics such as bandwidth (for a large number of simultaneous user activities), the rate of dropped packets, the quality of service (QoS) for specific uses, standards compliance for future expansion, security, and much more.
Yet in each step of our process, our goal is to provide superior quality of experience (QoE). In other words, we share your goal of wanting your wireless-network users to appreciate the convenience of mobility, without suffering from performance limitations.
Would you drive over a new bridge that has not yet been tested with anything more than a few cars and one large truck? If you are in slow, closely spaced, rush-hour traffic, surrounded by several heavy trucks, you want to know that the bridge can handle all that weight at once. In a similar way, testing your newly deployed wireless network by asking a few laptop users to “test it out” isn't going to reveal its performance under a heavy load.
Eliminate your wireless-network risks. Save money! Ensure scalability. And most of all, ensure user satisfaction.
Call the wireless-network experts at MetaSkills Technical Services at 503-245-4190.
Have questions? Contact us.
Want to read more? Read the technical details on the What & How page.