A few weeks ago while on a flight from Minneapolis to Dallas, I passed the two million frequent flier mile mark on American Airlines. This revelation got me to start thinking about all the time that I’ve spent cooped up in a hollow metal tube and how much nicer it would have been with a decent WiFi connection!So far, it seems that market financial forces and the FAA have been the main sticking points keeping WiFi from making its grand entrance at 30,000 feet. The airlines have been under considerable financial pressure for years now and with the high price of Jet A fuel, the prospect of taking a plane out of service for a few days to install WiFi gear is the making of a nightmare for the airline accountants.

Also, the airlines and the FAA have spent years touting the dangers of wireless devices on planes (whether real or imagined, we don’t really know yet). Sorry folks, but it’s going to take a complete ‘about face’ before WiFi on planes moves into the mainstream.

The other issue with WiFi in the Sky is the backhaul links. Just lighting up the inside of a metal tube with 802.11 signals isn’t really the hard part. How do you get the data off the plane and on to the ‘Net?

The two main methods at this point have been to send it to a satellite or send it down to base stations on the ground. I’ve been on customer networks that have had satellite links between their locations and it’s not fun. Email and slow browsing are the facts of life. Slow bandwidth, coupled with high/variable packet latency kills most advanced media from traversing the link.

Ground based stations seem to have the promise of more bandwidth and more control over the network, but placement of base stations can be problematic, unless an already mature technology is used (i.e. EVDO/GPRS).

Whatever the future holds for Internet access in the sky, I sure hope is comes before I hit the next million mile mark!

Recently, while getting some bids for a home construction project, one of them came back with a dollar figure coupled with this caveat: ‘Bigger than a bread box, smaller than a submarine.’ I see this same kind of concept practiced with wireless capacity planning at a lot of the companies that see on a day to day basis.

Why do so many IT departments follow this planning philosophy?

Well, it boils down to not having the reporting and visibility required to make good business decisions to maximize the IT budget.

Over the last year, I have done several webcasts around capacity planning and wireless best practices. Most of these have focused around the wireless side of the equation, but as wireless becomes more ubiquitous, there is now the requirement to look at other pieces of the puzzle as well. Take for example the wireless hotspot marketplace. Many of these locations are served with DSL or cable modem access. Remote office locations are also typically served by these types of links as well. In this case, what component is the weak link in the chain? Of course, the WAN link is the limiting factor!

In the latest version of the AirWave Management Platform, there is now the ability to monitor and report on switches, routers, and other gear in the network that can impact the wireless network. In addition, there is a new Capacity Planning report that not only shows the capacity of the wireless APs and controllers, but can also show capacity available on other network components as well.

In case you missed it, we hosted our 2nd-highest attended webcast ever on Tuesday, “Troubleshooting the Wireless LAN.”

Beyond the large attendance, the demand for a recording of the webcast post-event has been overwhelming!

So, without further ado, we present to you our newest addition to AirWaves:

Click to view “Troubleshooting the Wireless LAN” Webcast

If you have any questions or comments regarding the show, please direct them to the forum!

Here are a couple of slides that we went over, giving you an idea of the show:

Enjoy!

In the ‘Troubleshooting the WLAN’ webcast that I did earlier this week, I talked about the technical items that the helpdesk really needs to know to move from a ‘Production Metric’ helpdesk to a ‘Customer Service’ helpdesk. The helpdesk industry over the last decade has really moved from being an organization that is geared around hold times, abandonment rates, tickets opened, calls received, and other production metrics to an organization that starts to value the ‘softer’ side of the call center.

These ‘softer’ customer service metrics are geared around first call resolution, reopened ticket percentage, and other items that revolve around how the caller feels about the experience, rather than just how fast the helpdesk can pick up the phone. If we look out at the IT industry as a whole, there have been several recent examples of large IT companies who forgot that customer satisfaction is just as important as how fast you answer the phone! Now, those companies are paying for it with reduced sales, a falling stock price, and erosion of their corporate brand value.

So, to take this down from an overall corporate view and apply it to the wireless helpdesk, what do we need to give to our front line employees to improve their customer service metrics? Well, it boils down to giving them the applications to solve problems immediately, and if they can’t be solved at their level, the ability to escalate to the proper team for a quick resolution.

In the wireless space, it’s all about letting the helpdesk view real time user information, visually displaying RF information in an easy to read format (remember, the helpdesk is not staffed with RF engineers), trending information (see my earlier blog on ‘Troubleshooting Deltas’), and other troubleshooting dashboards. This way, the helpdesk can accurately diagnose the problem and either fix the issue, or get the trouble ticket to the correct place in the least amount of time.

Once the helpdesk is able to start focusing on the ‘softer’ side of their business, the user satisfaction rates will go up and the ROI of the wireless network starts to really take hold.

Recently some of my colleagues attended the National Retail Federation show in New York City. Just before show started, AirDefense did a survey of almost 800 stores in the New York City area to get a sense of what kind of security was in place. The results, while very dismal for retailers, are not very surprising at all. There were still many places where no security is in place or the easily broken WEP key was still being used.

This brings us to a bit of a quandary. How do we make it easier to implement better security and provide a way to audit the network while detecting rogue devices? Well there are a couple of things that we can do to help mitigate the security risk.

First, there needs to be a realization that security is not just a ‘point’ product or a ‘once in awhile’ process. It’s something that needs to be integrated directly into the organization. Using tools that can manage configurations centrally and can audit the network to make sure those configuration policies are consistent is key. This applies to not only the RF settings (i.e. what you’re broadcasting out of your AP), but also the wireline side of your devices. Remember, there are threats coming from inside the network as well!

I’ve been into many customer sites over the years, many of them retailers, and it still amazes me how some customers can be so organized where they know each and every configuration setting on their devices, while others haven’t the slightest clue what’s actually running in their own network. How can we have a secure network that will pass PCI audits when no one actually knows what’s loose on the network?!

The second item that the survey brought up was the number of potential rogue devices that were deployed. PCI today only requires quarterly scans for rogue devices. I’m not sure about you, but that seems a bit long to me! Putting in automated tools to detect these devices as soon as possible is much more in the spirit of true security. In addition to doing wireless scans, which only determines that someone is bleeding into your RF space, performing a wireline scan to determine if the device is truly a security threat is important. By determining whether a device is actually plugged into the wired network it reduces the amount of work involved with determining whether something is ‘truly’ a rogue or if it’s just the AP in the Starbucks across the street.

The whole key to this endeavor is to take the concept of security and making it a part of the day to day operations of the IT staff.

Senior AirWave engineer Jeremy Haltom discusses what he is advising actual customers in the field interested in 802.11n to do to prepare their networks for this high-speed wireless:

• how to baseline the WLAN
• The implications of 802.11n’s higher speed and wider coverage
• Impact on client devices
• Infrastructure life cycles and replacement schedule (and their cost implications)

Click to view the “Capacity Planning WLANs: How to Get Ready for 802.11n” webcast

So what is covered in a best practices for WLAN management webcast, anyway?

We discuss the latest WLAN management trends and approaches in user and client device monitoring, capacity planning and monitoring, help desk involvement, diagnostics, event correlation, network growth and evolution, device configuration, compliance, and maintaining complex security policies.

Yes, the world of management is growing and it never hurts to hear what Jeremy Haltom had to say about it.

Click here to view the Best Practices in WLAN Management webcast

Jeremy Haltom has become a bit of a “diamond in the rough” for us here at AirWave as he continues to shine brightly as our guest speaker on some of the more pressing industry topics today. We don’t want to inflate his ego too much, but he does a great job of helping you understand what practical tips you can walk away from and put to use in your own WLAN environment.

This time, Jeremy helped explain the eight most common security threats facing a WLAN infrastructure today and how to deal with them, followed by an open Q&A with the audience. If you have any more questions for Jeremy or AirWave, feel free to post away in the forums.

And now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for, Jeremy Haltom’s webcast on WLAN Security Best Practices:

Click here to view the Best Practices in WLAN Security webcast