Press
Today, Ekahau announced the release of ESS 8.6, which includes antenna patterns for 7signal Sapphire Eye Wi-Fi performance sensors, models 2100, 200 and 500. ESS is a popular site survey tool used by over to 500,000 WLAN professions worldwide to design Wi-Fi networks. With this latest enhancement, ESS users now have the ability the plan out their Wi-Fi performance network at the same time they design their wireless network to meet both coverage and capacity requirements.
“When it comes to designing Wi-Fi networks, Ekahau has everything you need. But once the new network is in place, 7signal Wi-Fi performance sensors ensure a great user experience now and in the future. We do this by exercising and measuring the quality of the network against key performance indicators 24 hours a day, 7 days a week,” stated Veli-Pekka Ketonen, CTO of 7signal. “It starts with great network design and continues with proactive performance management…the two solutions complement each other very well.”
Sapphire Eyes are high performance Wi-Fi clients developed and patented by 7signal. They are purpose-built to measure connectivity and the quality of the end-user experience on enterprise networks. When service level targets for an acceptable Wi-Fi experience are not reached, 7signal notifies IT staff through its email alerting system, allowing for a proactive response to the situation before any users notice or complain about lost productivity.
The Sapphire Eye 2100 contains a powerful directional sector antenna board allowing it to connect and test many wireless access points in its vicinity. One Sapphire Eye 2100 may connect to 8 access points, depending upon your topology – and this is where integration with Ekahau Site Survey is so useful. ESS has the ability to tell you exactly how many Sapphire Eyes you need for total Wi-Fi performance management coverage.
Sapphire Eyes execute end-user synthetic test traffic (Layers 1-7), perform a comprehensive RF analysis (Layers 1-2) and also offer 2.4GHz and 5GHz spectrum analysis. The tests are defined in a custom automated test profile. Data is analyzed against key performance indicators and the results are accessed through EyeQ, an intelligent, cloud-based Wi-Fi management dashboard that is quite different than anything you may see in Cisco Prime or Aruba Airwave. These are a few of the 600 key performance indicators that can be measured and tracked continually.
- Throughput
- Packet loss
- Latency
- Jitter
- VoIP quality
- Success rates
- Retry rates
- Airtime utilization
If you’d like to get a demo of 7signal and learn about managing your Wi-Fi network proactively, instead of dealing with “drop-everything” crises, then please let us know.