In the world of enteprise IT, wireless is weird. In many ways its the least commodified of the different IT silos. Don’t get me wrong, spend enough time talking to storage or networking folks, and you’ll get down to bare metal conversations before you know it. But when you’re much more likely to get into conversations about laws of physics when discussing Wi-Fi and mobility.
Wireless IT also seems to personally effect end-users. Perhaps it’s because it’s easier for them to seemingly isolate Wi-Fi as the source of their frustration, it seems less bundled into other IT infrastructure (even if it really isn’t).
This makes these end-users both insanely frustrating, with the blanket declaration that “Wi-Fi sucks”, but also useful as the ultimate arbiter of performance. There’s generally only binary reactions of approving apathy or vocal derision.
Tom Hollingsworth saw a bunch of companies at Mobility Field Day that are looking to add some nuance to this situation. Companies like Nyansa and Cape Networks take different approaches to providing meaningful analytics that can given insight into actual end-user experience, and correlate that back to what’s happening on he wireless network in real time. The ultimate goal of a lot of next generation wireless analysis is to move from reactive troubleshooting with faster root cause identification and remediation, to eventually be able to proactively seek problems to fix.
As Tom states, it’s probably not the Wi-Fi. But we’re still in early days of analytics being able to quickly tell us the reason why that’s not the case.
The Networking Nerd comments:
After finishing up Mobility Field Day last week, I got a chance to reflect on a lot of the information that was shared with the delegates. Much of the work in wireless now is focused on analytics. Companies like Cape Networks and Nyansa are trying to provide a holistic look at every part of the network infrastructure to help professionals figure out why their might be issues occurring for users. And over and over again, the resound cry that I heard was “It’s Not The Wi-Fi”
Read more at: It’s Probably Not The Wi-Fi
