Webinar Recording & Slides – 5 Effective Ways to Improve Wi-Fi

Last week, we hosted two webinars, called “5 Effective Ways to Improve Your Wi-Fi”.

A big thank you for the 500 participants, who remained on the line all the way to the end, although both times we ran 30 minutes overtime with the Q&A.  

SLIDES:
http://www.ekahau.com/misc/Webinar-Ekahau-5-Ways-to-Improve-WiFi-Feat-Trent.pdf

RECORDING (European webinar):
https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/645782590

Cheers,
Jussi Kiviniemi / Ekahau

Ekahau Webinar This Wednesday: Design and Deploy Better Wi-Fi Networks

We will show, hands-on, how to design, deploy (site survey), and troubleshoot Wi-Fi networks.

Coverage, performance, and capacity are all considered.

We will also showcase our new Wi-Fi monitoring and troubleshooting tool that runs on Android tablets and smartphones.

> Register Here

Latest in RTLS and Wi-Fi tools @ IP Expo / London Wednesday and Thursday this week!

Ekahau is exhibiting at IP Expo in London Wed and Thu this week.

If you’re curious about what’s the latest in indoor location tracking and Wi-Fi life cycle management tools, come see us!

Find us at stand B47.

The event is held at Earls Court 2.

– IP Expo Webpage http://www.ipexpo.co.uk/

Video: Indoor Navigation Done Right

The problem with most mobile phone navigation apps is they just don’t work indoors. Just try to find your way through a huge hotel or a shopping mall.

To address this problem, our partner GAB has made a very nice indoor navigation app. It accurately guides you through to your destination in real-time, even including Google Street View type assistance in selected locations.

On a technical level, the GAB app combines indoor navigation intelligence with real-time location information from Ekahau Real-Time Location System. The location accuracy in the Ekahau RTLS is very high, typically few feet (a couple of meters) indoors. The position is updated every few seconds.

Check out the video below:

—
Jussi Kiviniemi / Ekahau

Webinar This Thursday: Easier Wi-Fi Troubleshooting and Monitoring

I’m hosting a webinar this coming Thursday about how to make life a little easier for those of us who have to troubleshoot, analyze and monitor Wi-Fi networks.

It’s no secret I’ll be demonstrating Ekahau Mobile Survey, our brand-new Android phone/tablet based Wi-Fi tool there.

If you have time, register now and join in on Thursday at 10am pacific, 1pm eastern, early evening in Europe

I’ll also record the webinar (given we get no tech difficulties with the webinar system….)

—
Jussi

Ekahau Mobile Survey: Wi-Fi Analysis goes Android

Today Ekahau will release Ekahau Mobile Survey. It’s an Android based application for analyzing, troubleshooting, and monitoring any Wi-Fi network. Mobile Survey runs on modern, android-based phones, as well as tablets, such as the Samsung Galaxy S.

Mobile Survey runs on mobile phones as well as tablets, such as the Samsung Galaxy Tab

This is a completely new way of approaching Wi-Fi analysis: Before, you’ve had the analysis applications either on a laptop, a PDA-style device, or a dedicated piece of hardware.

Mobile Survey, however, allows you to start analyzing and troubleshooting immediately after discovering a problem – because it runs on your phone!

Also, Mobile Survey can be used to monitor your Wi-Fi network even when you’re not using the application. So just put your phone in your pocket, and Mobile Survey will make network tests every now and then – without interrupting you in any way. This allows you to walk about the facility, do your daily business, and use your phone normally.  Only when Mobile Survey detects a network error, will it notify you.

The background monitoring feature brings a true end user device point-of-view to network monitoring: Whereas access points and sensors monitor the Wi-Fi network from the ceiling, Mobile Survey monitors the network where the users actually are.

After all, the RF environment is quite different in the ceiling compared to the floor level.

Recording: Integration between Ekahau Site Survey and Cisco WCS

Saurabh (Bhasin, WCS product line manager at Cisco) and myself hosted a webinar last Monday about the integration between Ekahau Site Survey 5.1 (out in a couple of weeks) and Cisco WCS 7.0 (out already).

In a nutshell, after working on a network plan with ESS 5.1, you can import maps, access points and walls directly to WCS. This cuts down the workload, plus reduces the possibility for human error.

Check out the recording: https://cisco.webex.com/ciscosales/lsr.php?AT=pb&SP=EC&rID=47116522&rKey=4c1f58577807817d

Should there be any questions or feedback regarding the integration or webinar, feel free to comment!

Cheers,
Jussi Kiviniemi / Ekahau

Ekahau HeatMapper 64bit Released!

Ekahau HeatMapper, the free Wi-Fi coverage mapping tool for homes and small offices, finally works with 64bit operating systems. In its first 1,5 years of existence, HeatMapper became one of the essential Wi-Fi tools for anyone working with Wi-Fi.

We were actually a bit surprised by how well HeatMapper was received by the public: When the tool came out, we had to up our outgoing bandwidth and reconfigure out servers to handle the increased traffic. Today, the free tool has hundreds of thousands of users, and has received blazing reviews from the Wi-Fi authorities.

Download HeatMapper for free at www.ekahau.com/heatmapper , and check out HeatMapper’s big brother, Ekahau Site Survey at www.ekahau.com/ess .

A big thank you for all of you who have downloaded HeatMapper! We’ll release new stuff for HeatMapper in 2011 – stay tuned, and let us know what you would like to see.

Ekahau HeatMapper draws Wi-Fi coverage maps, locates access points, and shows AP information in real-time

Cheers,
The HeatMapper Team

Ekahau Site Survey 5.0 out!

After working on version 5.0 of Ekahau Site Survey for 9 months, we finally released it on Friday. Pretty much on schedule even (!)

A standing ovation to Kimmo, Ilmari, Timo VT, Tomi PK, Mikko, and everyone inside and outside Ekahau for their contribution in making the release happen.

And a very special “kiitos” to those active customers who’ve been kind enough to take their time to write us innovative feature requests.  Keep them coming!

New features covered here.

Faster, Easier Wi-Fi Network Design

On this blog, there are two types of blog entries typically:

• Educational (where I try to keep the Ekahau-hype to a minimum)
• Summaries or insights to Ekahau announcements.

This one is the Ekahau announcement kind. If you want to avoid Ekahau-promotion, I suggest moving on to, say, Dilbert, for now. But do come back the next time around.

Anyways, Ekahau has announced Ekahau Site Survey 5.0. It’s the second major release within the last 10 months – the last one, 4.6, brought Hybrid Site Surveys and more advanced noise measurements. We could’ve actually called that version 5.0 already, but decided to keep it 4.6 since we want to align the version numbering with Ekahau RTLS. So we’re releasing both Ekahau RTLS 5.0 and Site Survey 5.0 in June. More about Ekahau RTLS 5.0 later.

Site Survey 5.0 brings a couple of new cool features to the table:

1. Automatic network planning: You simply indicate the areas you want to cover (using a super-easy tool) and select your requirement, such as VoIP. ESS will automatically calculate the optimal AP locations and channels for you.The cool things with the Auto-Planner is that it’s really fast, and it’s 3D.  3D meaning that the access point locations will be optimized so that you maximize the coverage, including floor-to-floor signal  bleed-through.  Similarly, the channels are optimized taking into account the multiple floors, so that you end up with the least possible amount of co-channel interference in a multi-floor environment.The auto-planner takes out so much manual work that I claim your network planning will be ten times faster.
2. Support for CAD drawings: In many cases, you don’t get a nice little png image as your floor plan, but you get a CAD drawing. Instead of having to convert the CAD to a bitmap using a 3rd party tool, ESS will now accept CAD drawings as well. Big time saver for many of our users.
3. Support for 64bit operating systems (Vista/7): Allows larger projects work more smoothly. Java has a max memory usage limit of 1.4GB per application in 32bit operating systems.
4. Optimized Support for many USB adapters: Gives more flexibility when choosing a Wi-Fi adapter to use.
5. More antennas for network planning: Ekahau Site Survey has a database of about 400 antennas and all the most popular Wi-Fi access points. Makes network planning easier and more accurate.