I was meeting with a potential client and we began discussing their business drivers for deploying wireless. We often ask this questions of companies and we normally get the typical responses:

1. Our (insert exec title here) has wireless at home so now we have to make it work in the office
2. Cisco gave our CIO a great sales pitch
3. We have some special applications that require mobile devices that can only connect via wireless (VOIP phones, bar code scanners, mobile printers, etc.)
4. Its for our conference rooms and other gathering places that are inconvenient to plug into

Well this company was quite a bit different and I think quite forward looking. Their belief is that wireless costs less, is easier to secure, and gives them more flexibility over wired network. Period. No caveats. Most IT people can buy part of the flexibility argument, but only in certain locations or specific type of work environments. No one in IT that I have ever spoken to would dare argue the security and cost element. Let me lay out their thought process.

First is cost. Today this company is in a growth phase and they are constantly adding new office space. To set up a new facility they have to go in, wire the building, put in physical security, furnish the office, assure there is power, etc. By far the biggest lag time they have is in wiring the place. If they can remove the need to roll out ethernet to every office and cubicle they assume they can decrease their new office roll-out time by over 50%. They obviously translates into serious cash.

The second argument is security. Like most large organizations they are trying to move to a NAC based architecture on the wired side of the network. 802.1x (port based authentication) makes a lot of sense and the added virus scanning/patch management/end point security elements of NAC in theory are great. But when you have tens of thousands of employees and thousands of switches and routers, the cost and complexity of NAC is overwhelming. But with wireless, 802.1x is basically built in. Flip on WPA2 on your access points (and/or controllers), integrate with that radius box and configure the existing supplicant on your microsoft laptop and off you go (well its not quite that easy but close). Wireless networks are indeed very secure today (when properly configured) and in this particular companies view a lot easier to roll out than retrofitting their existing network. Big security advantage…as well as even bigger cost savings.

The final issue was flexibility. This particular company is often having employees juggle their work space; moving from one cube to another, changing office, reconfiguring work spaces, etc. This seems to be a them in many corporate environments as organizations begin to tear down the cube walls in favor of “collaboration”. Well, being tied to a physical port puts a real damper on this and limits their movement to the distance their ethernet cable can reach. With wireless its move to your hearts content. Some wired bigots may say “but that ethernet port is so much faster than wireless, how can you abandon it?” Well with 802.11n that problem will be gone. So more flexibility at the same speed and bandwidth of that old stodgy ethernet port.

Pretty exciting stuff!

Interesting article in yesterday’s NY Times on how Netflix is using its live customer support to differentiate itself from competitors like Blockbuster. (As a Netflix customer, I can testify that they do a great job. No waiting on hold!)

It’s a smart move. One of the things that smaller, specialized companies typically do well (compared to their larger and more bureaucratic rivals) is to focus fanatically on customer support and on meeting their customer’s needs.

We’re a technology company supporting technical users in IT, so it’s particularly important that our customer support engineers be exactly that: engineers. If the customer on the other end of the phone knows more about the product than the support team, you’ve got a problem. It’s also critical that the customer support engineers have regular contact with the developers building the product — so they can get fast and accurate answers and can provide direct input to the developers on what’s working and what’s not [At AirWave this is easy — the customer support engineers have to walk right through the software development area when they arrive at work, when they leave, and whenever they want coffee].

For IT customers evaluating technology products, I’d recommend making testing customer support teams and processes a critical part (if not the most critical part) of the vendor selection process: call the support line, talk to the people, assess their knowledge, see how quickly they respond to your requests for assistance. You’re not just buying a product, you’re buying a team.

If you work at the user helpdesk in an IT organization, you know that most users only report two problems related to wireless: (a) “I can’t get connected” and (b) “The network is slow”. Your job is to figure out what’s really going on: Is it a network problem? An RF issue? Or did the @#*&% user change his client settings again? While you have the user on the phone (and before you get too far in your diagnostic process), make sure you know the answer to these basic questions:

1. Is the user actually connected to your wireless network? [Sometimes a user may have connected to a neighbor’s network without knowing it or he might be connected to your network but having difficulty authenticating]
2. Is the user authenticated?
3. Where is the user located? Should you have strong wireless coverage in that area?
4. Are all access points or controllers in the area operational?
5. Which access point is the user closest to?
6. Are other users connected to that AP? [If so, it’s much more likely that the network is fine but your user has a client configuration problem. If not, you might have a network problem.]
7. Is the user receiving a strong RF signal?
8. How does current wireless usage in that area compare to recent trends? [If network usage is a lot higher than usual, you may have a capacity problem]
9. Has the user successfully connected to your wireless LAN in the recent past? Using the same device?
10. Has the user tried enabling and re-enabling hiw wireless radio? Rebooting?