After going through the list of questions from my recent webinars, I’ve decided to start addressing some of the common questions here in the Airwave Blog.

One of the common themes that I hear is, ‘What kind of mission critical applications are common on wireless networks?’ This kind of question can be very complex and varies by industry, but I thought I’d talk about some of the high points that I see with some of the prospects and customers that I have visited over the last couple of years.

In healthcare, there are two major applications that seem to be consistent. The first is WiFi VoIP deployments. Whether these are the Vocera badge type of devices, the more typical SpectraLink (now Polycom), or Cisco WiFi VoIP phones, being able to communicate with the hospital staff on a timely basis is important. In addition, I’m seeing quite a bit of IV pump and heart monitors that are being monitored over the wireless network. Obviously, these are extremely critical items!

In the retail and transportation verticals, inventory management and package tracking can make or break your business. Consequently, things like handheld inventory scanners and forklift terminals are at the top of the list. In the future, things like RFID will start being more important for all retail organizations, instead of the small list of mega retailers that rely on this technology today.

“It’s better than a trip to the dentist!”

That was actually a compliment from one of our customers - he said that in his experience calling customer support is usually like a trip to the dentist, but that AirWave is the exception.  We try very hard to provide an experience that’s personal and responsive.

When you call AirWave support there’s no phone tree to navigate.  Your call rings directly to the phones of support engineers.  On the rare occasion we’re all on the phone at once you might have to leave a voicemail, but we’ll give you a call back very soon (our goal is under an hour).

We’ve gotten to know many of our customers well - we know who breeds championship German Shepherds, who loves his motorcycles, and who is a die-hard Minnesota Vikings fan (and I’d like to point out that as a die-hard Green Bay Packers fan, I still answer the phone when he calls).

Many of our customers give us standing support connections, which allows us to access their AMPs any time to troubleshoot a problem or to check on how AMP is performing in different real-world environments.  We also have a subset of customers who always like to be offered our beta code, which helps us get feedback and fix any problems before we make a release available to everyone.  If you’d like to be on that list and you’re an existing AirWave customer, contact support@airwave.com and let us know.

So, on this last work day before Thanksgiving, I’m thankful for our great customers, who help make AirWave support a great place to be.

While planting over 30 large trees recently, as part of a landscape project, I was reminded of a saying from an ole’ nursery man that I used to know. He said that when planting new trees, they typically followed the following growth pattern for the next three seasons: Sleep, Creep, and Leap. This pattern is very typical of most wireless deployments that I’ve observed.

In phase one, the ‘sleep’ phase, we are designing our wireless network, deploying our pilot site, working out coverage issues, and troubleshooting application problems. This is the phase where doing our homework and selecting products that actually meets business needs vs. just being the latest technology come into play.

In the creep phase, this is when we start getting more users and devices on our network. This is the phase where we need to be fine tuning the ‘as deployed’ wireless documentation, but also documenting the processes that need to occur when things go wrong. This should include those steps (and tools) needed to troubleshoot the wireless network along with escalation paths when things don’t go as planned.

The last phase is when the real fun begins! With trees, it’s seeing them start really taking off and grow like a weed. For the wireless network, this is when all the hard work starts paying off with increased business productivity and flexibility. However, just like with anything else, we still need to keep on top of things, prune when necessary, and enhance as required.

There’s an interesting article in Computerworld today about the need for more integrated management of wired and wireless networks.

There often seems to be an assumption that integration is the responsibility of the hardware vendor — and often hardware vendors seem to believe that offering a wireless controller on a blade in a switch constitutes “integration.” That’s consolidation, not integration.

Truly integrated management must involve existing network management frameworks — integrating wireless data and location information with existing service desk, asset management, event correlation, and other applications. This means that the major network management software providers need to make their applications increasingly ‘wireless aware’ through integration with wireless systems. This simply is not happening today.

Only when these NMS providers step up their level of activity will we truly achieve wired-wireless integration.

In a recent AirWave customer survey, more than 70% of respondents indicated that they plan to test or evaluate a new wireless hardware provider by the end of 2008. That’s probably related to the introduction of 802.11n products — when organizations are evaluating new technologies and hardware upgrades, it’s a natural time for them to consider vendor selection.

Someone recently asked me how many vendors an organization should consider when performing an evaluation. There’s no right answer for every situation, but I usually recommend looking at three providers. More than that can be unwieldy and burn internal resources unnecessarily… In most cases, unless you’ve been burned by an unresponsive vendor, you will want to look at your incumbent provider’s new products. You should also evaluate at least one close competitor of your incumbent, so you can really understand technology differences, support capabilities, and other factors. For the third candidate, consider a vendor with a highly differentiated technology or product architecture — you may not select them as your primary vendor, but you might discover some niche solutions that will work extremely well in certain environments.

Thanks to everyone who joined the 802.11n Capacity Planning Webinar last week!  I have been going through all the questions that I didn’t have time to answer during our one hour session.  One question that was asked multiple times was, “Where can I find more detailed information about 802.11n?”  Below are a couple of really good resources that talk about some of the changes that 802.11n is incorporating, directly from some of the chipset vendors:

Broadcom:       http://www.broadcom.com/docs/WLAN/802_11n-WP100-R.pdf

Intel:                 http://www.intel.com/technology/magazine/communications/wi08041.pdf

WiFi Alliance:   http://www.wi-fi.org/files/WFA__80211n_faq_draft.pdf 

What items can we take care of from a wireless design and infrastructure point of view when it comes to our wired network? Well, there are a couple of things we can do to enhance the security and performance of the network. First, since almost all customers are now using multiple SSIDs and VLANs, then we should take the management VLAN (i.e. the IP address of the physical AP) and setup some ACLs that allow only the datacenter and administrators ability to access the AP.

Next, make sure that you don’t have too many users on each VLAN. Remember, until you move to 802.11n, the amount of broadcast traffic can be a much higher percentage of overall traffic than what we are used to on the Ethernet side of the network. Lastly, in most thin AP environments, keep in mind that all the wireless data is tunneled back to the controller(s). This dictates that we engineer enough backhaul bandwidth between our IDFs, MDFs, and datacenters to handle all this ‘tunneled’ data without impacting the rest of the wired network.