One of America’s largest consumer electronics chains with over 1,000 retail stores across the US, Mexico and Canada, prepares for a network-wide Wi-Fi refresh. To help their engineers fairly evaluate vendor options and define the next generation Wi-Fi standard for a typical store, they engaged 7SIGNAL.
In 2021 the six-year old Wi-Fi networks in most of the company’s stores will be up for review, and many of them will need to be replaced. When the total cost of ownership of a new nation-wide network can exceed $10 million, doing a comparison using an independent monitoring solution to choose a Wi-Fi solution with the best overall value, is a good idea.
Should they stay with their current provider, or is a change justified? Switching vendors is not to be taken lightly. There are many hidden costs in supporting multiple vendors during the transition from one to the other. To justify switching vendors, the company needed to see a 25-30% price / performance advantage between the incumbent, and the best alternative.
In the past, stores typically had 12 to 16 access points depending on the store layout. Using today’s latest equipment, what is the optimum number of access points, radios, streams, features, architecture
and placement, to satisfy certain minimum user performance thresholds?
As the enterprise Wi-Fi market has turned toward cloud management, the number of configuration options in terms of streams, radios, and management has multiplied. This makes it hard to compare like-for-like pricing, performance and functionality between vendor offerings.
With this level of investment the company needed to know what they would be getting. Even though evaluating WLAN performance is insanely complicated, they were determined to find a fair way to do a real-world "bake off" of sorts, so they had the full price / performance picture.
This is the strategic plan they devised: