Blog
The team is back from CiscoLive and wow, what a tremendous event. We launched Mobile Eye, our new app for measuring the Wi-Fi performance of mobile devices. The new product is in strong response to our customers who asked for visibility into the performance of their constituents' smartphones and tablets, whether corporate owned and managed, or not, a la BYOD policy.
At CiscoLive, attendees were invited to download Mobile Eye from the App Store. The app measures throughput, packet loss, delay and jitter. It also calculates a MOS score for VoIP voice quality. But the real story of Mobile Eye is its powerful, cloud-based Wi-Fi performance database and EyeQ executive dashboard for visualizing the Wi-Fi experience across buildings and geographies.
One of the ways EyeQ accomplishes this is through Google Maps integration. When Wi-Fi experience tests are taken from the device, the results are benchmarked against a service level target and color-coded green-yellow-red based on performance compliance. This colored marker is placed on the map in accordance with the GPS coordinates of the device at the time of the test.
For enterprises with facilities all over globe who depend on reliable Wi-Fi for operational efficiency, there has never been a system with the ability to provide this kind of visibility into the Wi-Fi experience. At a glance, Network Managers can see Wi-Fi performance degradation and take actions proactively instead of reactively waiting for angry complaints about lost productivity.
CiscoLive attendees downloaded Mobile Eye and began testing...and boy did they! Over the course of three days in Las Vegas, we saw over 18,000 individual tests taken up and down the Las Vegas Strip! Booth visitors loved the hotel SSID comparison we created in EyeQ. They could easily picture their own data, in their own city, on their own campus.
Another extremely popular use case that we demonstrated through EyeQ was the ability to view and compare the Wi-Fi experience of different people on your network. So often, calls come into the IT Help Desk about "crappy Wi-Fi" but with little data to back up the claim or troubleshoot it. With Mobile Eye and EyeQ, IT Help Desks know where, when, what kind of device, with which version of software...and precisely how "crappy" the experience really is. This represents a giant leap forward in Wi-Fi analytics, providing the information that is actually required in order to manage expectations and to provide excellent service to our internal customers who are utilizing the Wi-Fi network as a daily part of getting their work done.
You can start testing your own Wi-Fi network by downloading Mobile Eye for iOS here. There is also a version available on Android that's in beta. Just search for 7signal on Google Play. If you want to see your Wi-Fi experience data in EyeQ, then you can request a secure login through the app or by clicking the button below.
CiscoLive was a great event and we met a lot of fantastic people who are interested in gaining knowledge and visibility into their Wi-Fi network, beyond the usual tools and systems provided by access point vendors. Folks were genuinely wow'ed and excited and so was our team!
Our key message with Mobile Eye is to give enterprise IT professionals the ability to "see" the Wi-Fi experience of actual client devices used everyday by the people in their organization. This is the purpose of Mobile Eye and EyeQ. IT administrators can no longer afford to be flying blind with regard to managing the Wi-Fi experience of their global operations.