The Three Pillars of Great Wi-Fi

 In this episode of NatChat, Natilik's wireless experts Ashley Mead and Dan Johnson discuss the evolution of Wireless Walks, built around three pillars of great Wi-Fi: Coverage, Configuration, and Client Experience. They explore how combining RF assessment with application assurance tooling — such as ThousandEyes — gives IT and network teams a complete picture of wireless performance, helping to pinpoint issues faster and reduce mean time to resolution 

Ready to take the next step? Explore Natilik's Wireless Walk today: https://www.natilik.com/trials/wireless-walk/

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:15

Hi, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Natchat. Today's episode is a bit of an evolutionary episode, actually. I'm joined today by Ashley Mead, our solution architect for wireless here at Natilic, and Dan Johnson, our solutions engineer for networking and wireless. So welcome to the podcast, guys.

SPEAKER_03 0:34

Thanks very much. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 0:36

And I say this is a bit of an evolutionary episode because we're building on our conversation we had a couple of months ago around wireless walks. And Ashley, you and I jumped on a podcast looking at what was a wireless walk and what does it do for clients, and how is it a good tool to understand how people's networks and wireless were performing. And obviously, six months on from that, it'll be great to get your take on you know what how it's evolved and what you're finding, and also a bit of a recap, probably to start on what is a wireless walk.

SPEAKER_03 1:12

Yeah, that would be great. So I mean the the wireless walks has been a learning process for us in that we've learnt kind of what what really means uh the most for our clients when it comes to wireless, you know, what what what they find works well, what they find doesn't work well, and and how we get to the key of actually what they find important. So in conclusion with that, I've created for for Wireless Walks 2.0, I've come up with three things that I think form the basis of what would be good Wi-Fi. So if you kind of think of it as similar to the fire triangle, so the three things you need to make fire, which is fuel, air, and heat, like any one of those things is missing and you don't have fire. So any one of the things of the trio of Wi-Fi, if you don't have those, you won't have good Wi-Fi. You might have Wi-Fi, but you don't have good Wi-Fi.

SPEAKER_00 2:15

Okay. I I feel my marketing brain is spinning like trio of Wi-Fi, try fi, wi-fi, you there's something in there, definitely.

SPEAKER_03 2:22

Tri-fi works as well, yeah. Wi-Fi, try angle, yes, Wi-Fi angle. Yes, yeah, there's there's lots of options, right? So, yeah, so what are the things? I hear you ask, right? So the three things are so number one is coverage. So that includes everything that we tend to think about with a um a wireless design. So that would be based on AP placement, your your correct signal everywhere, your uh all your kind of channel interference and uh your capacity for the network, like where your clients are hanging out, all that stuff comes under coverage. So that's the first thing that must be correct.

SPEAKER_00 3:04

That kind of makes sense, doesn't it? Because the main thing is even as just a a standard user, as soon as you walk into you know a dead zone as such, it is that it completely disrupts your your experience or what you want to do, it puts a hole in everything. So yeah, coverage is included in that.

SPEAKER_03 3:23

Exactly, yeah, yeah. So it's all of those things. So I mean, obviously, wireless is a big subject, so I've had to kind of lump quite a lot into the three bits. So that I mean that's the idea though, to get a summary of the three pillars of a good Wi-Fi. So the second one is configuration. So we need to make sure, even though the APs could be placed correctly, if the correct configuration is off, again, it's gonna, we're gonna lose that performance, it's not gonna be optimized. So that needs to be perfect as well.

SPEAKER_00 3:55

Okay. And the last one?

SPEAKER_03 3:57

And the like Yeah, well, you know, I'd like to ask you what what do you think might be missing? So if we've got a great design and it's been uh deployed correctly, that all the transition has been done and everything's working well, what what is the last thing?

SPEAKER_00 4:13

Um I'm gonna assume it starts with a C, which is a little bit of health. So coverage, configuration, um clarity, I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 4:29

Clients. It does begin with a C.

SPEAKER_00 4:32

Okay. Client.

SPEAKER_01 4:34

Client experience.

SPEAKER_00 4:35

Okay, there we go. All right, do you want to take us through that one then, Dan?

SPEAKER_02 4:39

Yeah, so like ultimately you we could have a textbook wireless deployment, right? You know, as Ashley said, the signals there, the capacity, it's all set up, the co-channel interference or you know, contention as they call it these days, um, and the configuration, you know, absolutely textbook deployment. But if the applications that the end clients are experiencing um aren't accessible, for example, like a Microsoft Teams application, for example, um then what's the point of having good wireless? Right. So when you connect to a wireless network, ultimately you're gonna connect to wires, it will turn into a wired network. And then eventually you're gonna connect to someone else's network, right? So um, like someone else's cloud, for example, that's just a network somewhere else. Um so using uh assurance tools like ThousandEyes, for example, we can test every hop along the path, whether it's in your network or someone else's, um, the experience that a typical client would get, whether they're on the wireless or even on the wired.

SPEAKER_00 5:40

And would you have to test that for each specific application, or how does that work?

SPEAKER_02 5:45

Um, so from one endpoint, so um, like a Natilic laptop, for example, when we go on the walk, we can pre-define some tests. So we can test up to you know four or five at a time. Um we were at one uh not too long ago, and we were testing um, you know, Microsoft Teams and Outlook and um some like specific applications they had all in one go, um, just as we were doing the walk around.

SPEAKER_00 6:08

Oh, okay. And and what are you finding? Like, are there some gotchas that are coming out, or is are there some things where actually it makes sense and you have to go back to the other two C's, the configuration, the coverage. How is this client experience shaping how you do the wireless walks?

SPEAKER_02 6:26

Yeah, it's it's it is really interesting because that's you know, sometimes it is it is the wireless that needs to be fixed. Um, sometimes it's upstream issues that we're seeing. And oh, you know, sometimes it is just someone else's network. So, like if it was a um a WebEx calling channel um issues, for example, um, yeah, it it may be that it's an issue with Cisco's head end or a a hop along the way of the path and not necessarily the customer's environment.

SPEAKER_00 6:52

So it could actually stop lots of tickets being logged to the network team and the IT team can be like, My Microsoft Teams isn't working. What's going on? It's the Wi-Fi. Spot on running.

SPEAKER_02 7:01

It's like if if I raised a ticket now to our IT team, they can look at um my laptop's experience, whether I'm in the office or not, and they'll be able to see the certain applications that I'm going to, you know, but assuming tests are configured for it and we've we've configured it correctly, but they would be able to see um the real life path that my traffic's taking and be able to see whether it is an internal issue or an external issue. So on the walk, we use that to help frame um our assessment. So we'll ask customers before if they've got um any specific challenges or or issues, um, both for the RF side and for the application side. Um but yeah, if a client wanted to deploy similar tooling themselves, the mean time to uh resolution would be greatly reduced, right? Because we'd be able to see where issues are sourcing from.

SPEAKER_00 7:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 7:50

It's about having that complete picture so that yeah, the the first two might be great. You might have perfectly configured Wi-Fi, it might be a great design. But yeah, there still could be something in the line that doesn't quite work well. Could be a DNS server or DHCP server just not responding as well as it could be. So yeah, it appears to be the wireless isn't working, but it's all about, yeah, sort of mean time to finding that resolution. And and we can do all this as part of a wireless walk in a uh short visit.

SPEAKER_00 8:23

That's fantastic. I I love the fact that you guys are iterating, evolving, and bringing innovation to every single stage of this wireless walk process. Thank you so much for coming on and telling us what's new. And I'm sure in six months' time there'll be another C to add to the to the shape. Thanks so much, guys.

SPEAKER_01 8:42

Thank you.