The SecurEdge Blog

Early on in my career, I had the good fortune to be part of two very well-funded programs that supported both higher education and K-12 technology adoption.

You get what you pay for.

If your company is like most, you and your team are dependent on your company's wireless network. When the WiFi goes down, you can expect your company’s productivity to come to a screeching halt. And if you operate the kind of business where clients, diners, patrons, students, guests, patients or other forms of customers depend on guest access to your managed WiFi, even a relatively small outage can cause direct financial losses as well as damage to your reputation.

For most executives and IT managers, their company’s WiFi network is a strategic necessity -- right up there with utility power, HVAC, running water, and telecommunications. However, the process that companies go through when planning their wireless network design can be anywhere from frustrating to utterly confusing.

Wireless networking has been around for literally decades -- starting as a project to connect the Hawaiian Islands in 1971 (ALOHAnet, developed at the University of Hawaii).

In a matter of months, there will be 362 million public WiFi hotspots in use around the world. And that number is expected to continue growing at about a rate of 25% for the foreseeable future.

When you think about the 2,827 public and private, four-year degree granting education institutions in the United States, that’s a lot of students, faculty, and staff! To be more precise, there are 19.9 million students attending American colleges and universities.

  WiFi is dynamic. It fluctuates throughout the day, responding to the environment. As users, devices and applications drop in and off of the network, the performance of your WiFi will be affected, sometimes leading to slower downloading / uploading speeds and occasionally network outages. An experienced wireless network designer can make assumptions about your wireless environment based on things like industry and average daily users, and design a wireless network that is more resilient to these fluctuations. Even the best laid designs can experience performance issues, so you must have someone monitoring and managing your WiFi.