Wi-Fi – More Learnings

I’d like to document some of the learnings in the past few months in the Wi-Fi realm. This post will focus on Aerohive and Huawei technologies but aspects can be applied to other technologies as well.

I recently did a project to tune and upgrade Wi-Fi in retail stores and offices. The business did not want to invest or have a budget to rip and replace the Wi-Fi in the stores.

Below is the summary of changes which were done to improve the Wi-Fi at the stores in the retail space.

Wi-Fi Troubleshooting Plan

• List out common issues that the site is experiencing. Sort them according to the nature of their occurrence, areas, type, times etc.
• If it has been a while since the Wi-Fi infrastructure is deployed, make sure that the placement of AP is still relevant. I figured out that it had been around 3-4 yrs when the AP were deployed, a lot of things changed like new aisles came with stuff shifting causing some RF shadow or interference due to different type of metal blocking the signal. With that in mind there may be different networks which come in vicinity that have been causing ACI/CCI but due to the nature of older Wi-Fi infrastructure I found does not change channels that frequently.
• List out the type of clients and their max capabilities – 11n, 11a/b/g, 11ac, 2.4GHz only etc. based on that we can find a pattern and isolate issues depending upon the type of coverage.

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