CHWC has had a WLAN / Wi-Fi network for many years, with over 120 access points deployed throughout its facilities. Initially, its main purpose was to provide access to medical records for clinicians. Over time, traffic has grown significantly as more users, devices and applications utilized the network. As the network loads increased, Greg Slattery, CHWC’s CIO, realized his IT team had very little visibility into the end-user quality of experience. Greg tasked his team with finding a solution that enable them to monitor and analyze the WLAN on a continuous basis so they could take proactive steps to better understand their network performance issue and resolve them quickly before users complained.
Hospitals are notoriously difficult facilities for successful high-performance wireless LAN deployment. Devices of all types use Wi-Fi and other wireless technologies to communicate. Different traffic types need to be supported – data, voice and telemetry from medical devices. The users of the network will also vary – doctors, nurses, administrators, patients and guests. Add to that, the facilities are constantly being repurposed to adopt new processes and workflow. Complicating matters further, users often described a problem or issue in vague terms – “the Wi-Fi is down,” or “my connection dropped.” Often times the IT team suspected an issue to be specific to a particular device or to something else in the network besides Wi-Fi, yet they had no way of proving that to themselves or others.