Blog
To accommodate our growth, we just completed a move to our new headquarters in Cleveland, Ohio. The space is bright, open, functional and conducive to building a culture of innovation. After the boxes were unpacked and the new cappuccino machine was hooked up, we settled in and started working. But shortly into the day I received an unwelcome message from my web browser that stated, "Unable to connect to the Internet."
Oh no! This can't be! I hadn't experienced a Wi-Fi issue at 7SIGNAL in three years - and now - on day 1 in the new building...I had issues. I asked my neighbor, Bryant, if he was having issues and he said he was. Then Jonathan and Joe chimed in to confirm. I immediately jumped to conclusions and assumed that it was a building or ISP issue. I mean, we're The Wi-Fi Performance Company. How can we have Wi-Fi issues? But over yonder, on the other side of the suite, Marko, VP, Tom and Chris were working just fine. I picked up my laptop and walked to the other side. Successful roam - no Wi-Fi issues - so much for my theory.
I walked back to my desk and glared at the access point overhead. Hmmm...could he be the culprit? I whipped out my iPhone and fired up my handy Mobile Eye app to begin a test. I saw that I was connected to the 7sCORP SSID, however, all tests failed. Drilling into the ping results I saw that my device could not even successfully ping our default gateway. In 60 seconds I was certain I had an access point problem, but there was only one way to be sure.
Wi-Fi Performance Management to the Rescue
Kush and Marko checked the cloud controller from our access point vendor. No warnings, alerts or notifications. Status indicators showed everything as "green". Then they logged into the 7SIGNAL Analyzer. Lo-and-behold...major TCP errors detected on the access point positioned over my desk. However, all other APs were looking good according to Analyzer. So, in a grand total of five minutes, we identified the issue and rebooted the access point. The only reason why we didn't identify the Wi-Fi issue more quickly was because we hadn't set up alarms in 7SIGNAL yet. Hey, cut us a little slack - it was our first day!
But that's not quite the end of the story. An hour later the problem cropped up again. As a result, we took the access point out of service and increased the Tx power level on an adjacent AP. Problem solved. We were rolling again.
Then Joe, our software architect, pointed out something rather insightful. We have 5 access points in our suite so naturally, it wasn't too terribly difficult to find the root cause of the Wi-Fi issue. But imagine if it were a large floor with 30 to 40 access points and a hundred people moving in and out of the environment. From identification to remediation would have been a wild goose chase - especially since the AP vendor's dashboard indicated that everything looked okay.
The system works, folks. So please reach out to us so that you can give it a try. It could save you a ton of time and expense...even if it isn't your first day in a new building.