Is your corporate neighbour Wi-Fi friendly?

Having problems with your Wi-Fi connection? Keep dropping out with no obvious explanation?

It could be that your office neighbours are causing you bigger problems than just parking in your space or swiping that last Chicken and Avocado wrap you had your eye on in the communal restaurant. With an ever larger reliance on Wi-Fi connectivity in our mobile office environments, especially multi-tenanted buildings, the available Wi-Fi RF spectrum is rapidly gobbled up with the recent arrival of 802.11ac.

There was a time not too long ago when all you needed to do was move your clients to the 5GHz spectrum and all was well in the world, the 2.4GHz range was predominantly used by public service providers and guys who sold expensive coffee for a living. Not now.

Approximately 40% of our customers contact us with the same issues. Their once harmonious 5GHz network contaminated by ‘the new lot that have just moved in upstairs‘ who have installed new AP’s and configured them all to operate on 80Mhz channels.

At present there is a lack of Wi-Fi planning in some multi-tenanted buildings, with each tenant having to provide their own Wi-Fi infrastructure. This obviously leads to multiple vendor installations each competing for the same RF space and this soon becomes a free for all.

So what can you do about it?

Once we have completed a RF coverage check using Ekahau software to ascertain the degree of neighbour interference and any other underlying issues, the initial step we normally recommend is manually configuring all the relevant RF parameters.

But what about the auto RF system I was sold?

Auto RF is good if you have a single vendor network, but when you have multiple vendors all changing their parameters automatically, you will invariably get an unstable network.

In nearly every case, we can vastly improve the performance of the Wi-Fi network by understanding the existing RF environment and making the necessary configuration changes.

However as we all know, these changes are good while the status quo exists and you may need to buy your neighbour a caramel latte and start to put a plan together so your Wi-Fi networks can co habit in peace.