6 Points to Consider For Your Wireless Project

Created by Irvin Kovar (Bell Canada) on April 24, 2009

I recently polled my Senior Wireless Engineers at the Wireless Solutions Team in Mississauga and mentioned that I would like to give them a chance to speak up and contribute to this blog. As a group they have probably 50 years combined experience in Vow LAN (voice over wireless LAN) and data in all market segments when it comes to deploying WLAN. Our group is certified on Cisco, Aruba, Nortel, Meru and Motorola WLAN products and an enormous amount of implementation detail about these solutions. As you know each WLAN project is unique and each client organization has varying degrees of capabilities – some net new others very experienced. Over the last 5 years or so my team and I have seen numerous dozens of WLAN projects begin and end. Here is what my experts on the street had to share with me:

1. TAKE THE TIME TO WRITE A DETAILED SCOPE OF WORK

Nothing can damage a project more than failing to define business and technical requirements in advance. This may sound obvious but it is critical that you involve the designers "early" in the WLAN project to assess all User Groups, Bandwidth Requirements from frequency use and application perspective. This may be a time consuming process, involving a cross-functional panel from student users to vendor hardware partners. Everyone should have their say and sign-off of the intended hardware architecture and performance expectations for the applications. Once you have this roadmap, and buy-in, the document ensures all efforts align to this goal.

2. PLAN FOR GROWTH

We have to realize that wireless is an ever growing pipe in the air. Each year millions are being added to the wireless foot-print in on campuses world-wide. Our mobile culture and student body (Boomers, Gen X-Y-Z) know no limits – and expect no limits when interacting with cyberspace. Try to plan wireless for every possible area on campus – and off campus- that a student may travel and experience your applications. This means quite a bit of forethought on the size of wireless gateway, security, redundancy, AP licensing and the mid-span layer readiness (closet routers and switches) for growth. We are finding that not seeing that campus as a completely covered in WLAN will only add additional cost down the road when it comes time to fill in those nooks and crannies with RF – in the back hallways, labs and outdoor areas that were left off the list originally.

3. ENSURE YOU STAGE A TEST PROOF OF CONCEPT AND TEST YOUR WLAN

Once you have a detailed scope of work, you have to ensure your WLAN performance and management can be delivered by the particular vendor’s platform you decide upon. On the surface, for just basic performance and connectivity – all world-class WLANs appear similar. So many of our customers find out too late, that it is the really small differences in wireless solution capabilities that make solution one stand out from other from a client compatibility perspective.

For instance, how does one WLAN handle WIPS (Wireless Intrusion Protection)? Is it included or does it come in the form of a separate 3RD party appliance? Does it require separate Access Points (APs) or can an AP time-slice its processor and “sniff” the air for intrusion while in operation? How does it manage connections to the AP when this happens? Another common omission from a function perspective is not provisioning for voice services. Anticipating this makes it easy to integrate down the road. Voice UDP is not like data TCP/IP. You have to consider spectral interference, denser WIFI coverage, analog, digital, SIP or VoIP integration and man other factors to ensure a crisp copper-line quality voice call.

A past purchase or investment with a current platform may not deliver the functionality you need in 3 – 5 years from now. Products change.

In summary, it is very important that you do not randomly choose a vendor based on basic sales front-end information like the technical overviews on the company web-site. On paper they all look great. Plug them in and you will begin to develop your opinion on the performance of each feature. Keep testing until you can determine whether the WLAN vendor, who has likely a special differentiator to mark its position in the market, does what it claims. Test it and analyze the results.

4. DON’T CUT CORNERS ON PROJECT MANAGEMENT

A lot of clients are not willing to pay a little extra for project management. It does seem like a simple thing to leave off the list in an effort to reduce costs. But time and time again, a trained PM who has wireless experience has special insight on what is happening in the deployment and kind of actions that need to be taken to mitigate delays and errors. And it’s not just WLAN. Our project managers have to deal with intricacies of the LAN, mobile device, and sometimes the OS and software image on the PDA. In fact, wireless is so dependent on the entire wired and wireless pipe – a good PM understands the complete end-to-end picture of a solution and is invaluable as a lead to the delivery for all technical components. I would venture to say that wireless, as the definitive convergence area of our generation probably have the best project managers in IT. A wireless PM sees all the technology come together time and time again. For perhaps 5 – 10% project cost you can have a real pro at the helm and ensure your wireless solution has a smooth and successful installation and roll-out.

5. AVOID PIECEMEAL RF COVERAGE

We often get requests from customers requesting marginal wireless coverage to save cost. At first this seems like a sensible thing to do. But we really want to emphasize the philosophy behind wireless – user groups are going wander, walk-around and inevitably push the limits of the where then can take their digital experience. It is very important to look at your student body and faculty not as something status, but as something very fluid. Try to anticipate ubiquitous coverage if you can.

6. HIRE TRAINED WIRELESS PROFESSIONALS

Good RF engineers are no light-weights. A solid practice is trained repeatedly on the WLAN solutions they support and likely spend a lot of time in the weeds working on the nuances of the products that only a few technicians in the industry are aware of. Because Bell is a big channel for WLAN vendors, we get quick technical response and open access to partner engineering sources. The point here is that if an inexperienced client IT group is performing too many aspects of the wireless deployment without following industry RF and security best practices, there will likely be some issues. The best rule of thumb is that you should at a minimum hire an experienced technician to work along side your IT team for all aspects of the project for the first deployment so that a good transfer of knowledge can take place.

Cheers!

irvin.kovar@bell.ca

Irvin's blog
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		6 Points to Consider For Your Wireless Project Created by Irvin Kovar (Bell Canada) on April 24, 2009 I recently polled my Senior Wireless Engineers at the Wireless Solutions Team in Mississauga and mentioned that I would like to give them a chance to speak up and contribute to this blog. As a group they have probably 50 years combined experience in Vow LAN (voice over wireless LAN) and data in all market segments when it comes to deploying WLAN. Our group is certified on Cisco, Aruba, Nortel, Meru and Motorola WLAN products and an enormous amount of implementation detail about these solutions. As you know each WLAN project is unique and each client organization has varying degrees of capabilities – some net new others very experienced. Over the last 5 years or so my team and I have seen numerous dozens of WLAN projects begin and end. Here is what my experts on the street had to share with me: 1. TAKE THE TIME TO WRITE A DETAILED SCOPE OF WORK Nothing can damage a project more than failing to define business and technical requirements in advance. This may sound obvious but it is critical that you involve the designers "early" in the WLAN project to assess all User Groups, Bandwidth Requirements from frequency use and application perspective. This may be a time consuming process, involving a cross-functional panel from student users to vendor hardware partners. Everyone should have their say and sign-off of the intended hardware architecture and performance expectations for the applications. Once you have this roadmap, and buy-in, the document ensures all efforts align to this goal. 2. PLAN FOR GROWTH We have to realize that wireless is an ever growing pipe in the air. Each year millions are being added to the wireless foot-print in on campuses world-wide. Our mobile culture and student body (Boomers, Gen X-Y-Z) know no limits – and expect no limits when interacting with cyberspace. Try to plan wireless for every possible area on campus – and off campus- that a student may travel and experience your applications. This means quite a bit of forethought on the size of wireless gateway, security, redundancy, AP licensing and the mid-span layer readiness (closet routers and switches) for growth. We are finding that not seeing that campus as a completely covered in WLAN will only add additional cost down the road when it comes time to fill in those nooks and crannies with RF – in the back hallways, labs and outdoor areas that were left off the list originally. 3. ENSURE YOU STAGE A TEST PROOF OF CONCEPT AND TEST YOUR WLAN Once you have a detailed scope of work, you have to ensure your WLAN performance and management can be delivered by the particular vendor’s platform you decide upon. On the surface, for just basic performance and connectivity – all world-class WLANs appear similar. So many of our customers find out too late, that it is the really small differences in wireless solution capabilities that make solution one stand out from other from a client compatibility perspective. For instance, how does one WLAN handle WIPS (Wireless Intrusion Protection)? Is it included or does it come in the form of a separate 3RD party appliance? Does it require separate Access Points (APs) or can an AP time-slice its processor and “sniff” the air for intrusion while in operation? How does it manage connections to the AP when this happens? Another common omission from a function perspective is not provisioning for voice services. Anticipating this makes it easy to integrate down the road. Voice UDP is not like data TCP/IP. You have to consider spectral interference, denser WIFI coverage, analog, digital, SIP or VoIP integration and man other factors to ensure a crisp copper-line quality voice call. A past purchase or investment with a current platform may not deliver the functionality you need in 3 – 5 years from now. Products change. In summary, it is very important that you do not randomly choose a vendor based on basic sales front-end information like the technical overviews on the company web-site. On paper they all look great. Plug them in and you will begin to develop your opinion on the performance of each feature. Keep testing until you can determine whether the WLAN vendor, who has likely a special differentiator to mark its position in the market, does what it claims. Test it and analyze the results. 4. DON’T CUT CORNERS ON PROJECT MANAGEMENT A lot of clients are not willing to pay a little extra for project management. It does seem like a simple thing to leave off the list in an effort to reduce costs. But time and time again, a trained PM who has wireless experience has special insight on what is happening in the deployment and kind of actions that need to be taken to mitigate delays and errors. And it’s not just WLAN. Our project managers have to deal with intricacies of the LAN, mobile device, and sometimes the OS and software image on the PDA. In fact, wireless is so dependent on the entire wired and wireless pipe – a good PM understands the complete end-to-end picture of a solution and is invaluable as a lead to the delivery for all technical components. I would venture to say that wireless, as the definitive convergence area of our generation probably have the best project managers in IT. A wireless PM sees all the technology come together time and time again. For perhaps 5 – 10% project cost you can have a real pro at the helm and ensure your wireless solution has a smooth and successful installation and roll-out. 5. AVOID PIECEMEAL RF COVERAGE We often get requests from customers requesting marginal wireless coverage to save cost. At first this seems like a sensible thing to do. But we really want to emphasize the philosophy behind wireless – user groups are going wander, walk-around and inevitably push the limits of the where then can take their digital experience. It is very important to look at your student body and faculty not as something status, but as something very fluid. Try to anticipate ubiquitous coverage if you can. 6. HIRE TRAINED WIRELESS PROFESSIONALS Good RF engineers are no light-weights. A solid practice is trained repeatedly on the WLAN solutions they support and likely spend a lot of time in the weeds working on the nuances of the products that only a few technicians in the industry are aware of. Because Bell is a big channel for WLAN vendors, we get quick technical response and open access to partner engineering sources. The point here is that if an inexperienced client IT group is performing too many aspects of the wireless deployment without following industry RF and security best practices, there will likely be some issues. The best rule of thumb is that you should at a minimum hire an experienced technician to work along side your IT team for all aspects of the project for the first deployment so that a good transfer of knowledge can take place. Cheers! irvin.kovar@bell.ca Best Practices \| In-building wireless \| wireless applications \| Wireless Communicaitons \| Wireless deployment \| Wireless Policies \| Wireless Technology \| WLAN (Wireless Local Area Network) Irvin's blog Login or register to post comments 270 reads
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