A new dad looks at babies and Wi-Fi. Seemingly entirely dissimilar. But when you start looking at troubleshooting them, some commonalities arise.
Finding the Why in Wi-Fi
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.
Starting from the Bottom: Client-side Wi-Fi Monitoring
There are no shortage of tools for monitoring and analyzing network behavior from behind the access point. But as Drew Lentz points out, this ignores half of the network. While great pains are taken to build and maintain wireless infrastructure, network engineers need to be able to see how users are experiencing it. In order do understand how end-users are experiencing a wireless network, you must become one of them.