Wireless Consulting Expertise

Ekahau has developed a comprehensive suite of advanced software apps, compact scanning hardware, and cloud collaboration services to enable organizations of any size to design, validate, tune, manage, and troubleshoot Wi-Fi deployments. Progent's certified Ekahau experts can help your company to utilize Ekahau technology to carry out any facet of Wi-Fi planning and maintenance. Services offered by Progent's Wi-Fi consultants include:

• Establish the RF characteristics of your physical environment: (floor plan, construction materials, ceiling height, sources of RF interference, etc.)
• Estimate your current and future needs for Wi-Fi coverage, capacity, and performance
• Generate a predictive plan for Wi-Fi access point (AP) types, antenna options, placement, heights, and setup
• Propose a secondary coverage plan to enhance roaming and resilience
• On-premises signal strength testing and verification of your physical Wi-Fi implementation
• Onsite detection of RF noise from devices outside your Wi-Fi network
• Create a channel strategy that minimizes co-channel contention and nearby channel disruption
• Centrally monitor and manage single or multiple Wi-Fi networks
• Provide actionable reports on network performance analytics and issues
• Debug existing problems and anticipate looming ones before they impair productivity
• Improve your Wi-Fi solution cost effectively over time to continue meeting your evolving requirements

Progent also offers on-premises support for carrying out Wi-Fi site surveys with the help of Ekahau's Sidekick spectrum analyzer to measure actual performance and to find dead areas, RF interference, and other issues.

Ekahau's Products for Wi-Fi Network Design and Maintenance
Ekahau Connect is a family of software, hardware, and services from Ekahau for designing and maintaining modern Wi-Fi solutions. Used by the majority of Fortune 500 businesses, Ekahau's Wi-Fi products are available on a subscription basis as an integrated bundle. Some products included in Ekahau Connect are also offered individually. Progent can use the Ekahau stack to design, verify and troubleshoot your Wi-Fi deployment or assist your IT staff to use your own Ekahau tools.

Key pieces of the Ekahau Connect suite include:

Ekahau Pro
Ekahau Pro software allows you to plan, verify and debug Wi-Fi deployments. To build a predictive model, you draw a floor plan of your building. You then manually draw walls or read them into Ekahau Pro from a CAD program. You include doors, cable conduits, stairwells, and elevators and specify construction materials. Next you select various Wi-Fi access point models from Ekahau Pro's built-in database, which features coverage profiles and antenna patterns associated with your selected APs. Ekahau Pro's 3-D modeling allows you to increase or remove APs to create a heat map depicting Wi-Fi coverage. You can instantly adjust AP type, location, height and antenna options until the predictive model shows the coverage you need.

Ekahau Sidekick
Once your predictive design is finished and your APs are installed and set up, you can validate your deployment by performing an on-premises survey with the Ekahau Sidekick, a compact RF scanner that integrates with Ekahau Pro. This lets you measure actual Wi-Fi coverage so you can adjust your access point deployment as needed. Sidekick's integrated spectrum analysis capability can identify locations experiencing interference from transmitters not part of your wireless network and Ekahau Pro software can display these problem spots on your screen map so you can resolve the issues.

Ekahau Analyzer
Ekahau Analyzer software communicates with the Sidekick scanner and displays the results of critical health measurements of a Wi-Fi network. To help businesses to troubleshoot RF interference problems, the Analyzer app tests against specified requirements and displays prominent pass/fail indicators to highlight results. When a problem is flagged, you can use the Sidekick's portable spectrum analysis hardware to pinpoint causes of RF interference or congested channels. Features of Analyzer software include Auto-Test, Signal Strength Analysis, Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) Analysis, Channel Quality Analysis, and Spectrum Measurements. Results can be shown on a mobile Android or iOS device connected to your compact Sidekick scanner, streamlining the acquisition of diagnostic data.

Ekahau Insights
Ekahau Insights software provides centralized monitoring of Wi-Fi site health across multiple Wi-Fi deployments worldwide. Insight enables businesses to find and sort predictive design and Wi-Fi site survey projects, rank projects based on network health, manage a database of operating APs based on locality and technology generation, and track survey activity to make sure you verify your Wi-Fi venues regularly. Automated analysis shows how your Wi-Fi deployments perform in comparison to your requirements by site, floor, and space within a floor. A heatmap viewer provides visualizations for primary and secondary signal quality, channel interference, SNR, and additional Wi-Fi site health data. The ability to use tags streamlines file and workflow organization by allowing you to classify and search projects by client name, site type, workflow state, and other meaningful categories.

Ekahau Capture
Ekahau Capture software operates in conjunction with the Ekahau Sidekick scanner to collect Wi-Fi packets to help experts to fix challenging network problems. Capturing Wi-Fi packets may be necessary to troubleshoot problems involving connectivity, roaming between access points, poor audio, dropped phone calls, uneven channel utilization, faulty Wi-Fi drivers, hardware failure, improperly configured APs, outdated devices, or cybersecurity risks such as unencrypted traffic or denial of Service attacks. You can also use Ekahau Capture software to calculate Wi-Fi traffic stats such as retry frequency, average data rate, and frame class distribution. Ekahau Capture saves packet captures in the de facto standard libpcap (pcap) file format so they can be analyzed using familiar tools. Ekahau Capture can collect and store 802.11/a/b/g/n/ac frames and perform captures on a single channel or on multiple Wi-Fi channels.

Progent's Predictive Wi-Fi Planning Services
Progent's predictive Wi-Fi planning services can be carried out remotely and make use of Ekahau's cutting-edge RF simulation and analysis tools to plan an efficient Wi-Fi network. With predictive planning, you provide Progent's wireless professionals your facility's floor plans and describe your environment including walls, doors, cable access, elevator shafts, and fabrication materials. You also define your coverage, density, and throughput targets plus any constraints. In addition, you estimate the kinds of endpoints your clients will connect, the software they will run, and the peak wireless traffic they will generate. Progent will use your input to build a mathematical simulation of your environment and develop a design that includes the most appropriate manufacturers for your APs, the recommended number of APs, their optimal placement and antenna type, their proper settings and their predicted performance.

Progent's On-premises Wi-Fi Site Survey
Progent's onsite wireless survey uses Ekahau's purpose-built RF signal measurement instrument and related software tools to help you to validate, tune, and debug your current Wi-Fi deployment. These services are typically undertaken immediately after a fresh installation or used as a tool to scale, tune, or troubleshoot a mature Wi-Fi network. Offered throughout the U.S., Progent's on-premises Wi-Fi site survey services feature walkthrough testing for radio frequency coverage and interference, checking for AP overpopulation, RF propagation tracking, data protection assessment, and identification of optimum placement for client-requested Wi-Fi APs.

Progent's consultants can deliver remote and on-premises guidance for a broad range of wireless access points and offer services such as Cisco Aironet Wi-Fi access point integration, Cisco Meraki wireless AP cloud management, Cisco Small Business 100/300/500 Wi-Fi AP configuration, Cisco Catalyst wireless access point solution design, Ubiquity UniFi wireless access point configuration, and Apple AirPort Wi-Fi AP installation. Progent's on-premises wireless survey includes consultation with your network management staff to define performance parameters for the WLAN. Progent's BICSI RCDD and Ekahau certified wireless survey professionals can recommend affordable WLAN enhancements that utilize modern wireless products and provide top ROI.

Progent offers expertise for creating a state-of-the-art Bring Your Own Device wireless environment by providing services such as iPhone and iPad integration, and Android phone and tablet consulting. iPhones and tablets, Androids, Windows Phones, and other mobile endpoints can pose client density issues and can also cause transmit power mismatches that call for careful setup for APs. Progent's Wi-Fi site survey services provide the insight necessary to understand these challenges and build an affordable and effective BYOD ecosystem.

Deliverables for Progent's predictive and on-premises Wi-Fi site surveys can include:

• Radio Wi-Fi Spectrum Analysis including identification of RF issues related to your environment's layout, material structure, and other possible sources of RF interference so you can anticipate and mitigate issues during the wireless network design process.
• Coverage Maps in the form of color RF contour images for the areas requiring coverage to help you to select the optimal quantity and position of wireless access points and indicate likely RF spillover areas and holes in coverage
• Capacity Plan for defining and providing the bandwidth required to support all apps and users
• Cable Paths depicted as red line diagrams you can provide to cabling contractors
• Device Installation advice on where and how to install wireless devices plus description of special equipment that may be needed (NEMA enclosures, radio antennas, etc.)
• Infrastructure Requirements to specify all facility and networking resources necessary to support the Wi-Fi environment such as available switch ports, Power over Ethernet (POE), electrical power, and rack capacity

Advanced Network Infrastructure Consulting
Progent has one of the largest rosters of certified Cisco CCIE IT infrastructure engineers of any independent IT support firm in the U.S. and can assist your organization to integrate your Wi-Fi LAN seamlessly into your wired network. Progent can help you to deploy and maintain Cisco routers, switches, and security appliances as well as Cisco Mobility products including wireless APs and wireless LAN controllers. Progent also can provide advanced consulting for networking products from Juniper Networks, Apple, Ubiquity, and other top vendors. To learn more about Progent's online and on-premises consulting expertise for Cisco wireless technology, refer to consulting and debugging services for Cisco Wi-Fi products.

To help you with company-wide cybersecurity issues, Progent can provide the support of IT security engineers who have been awarded advanced credentials from CISA, CISSP-ISSAP, GIAC and other prominent data security organizations. Progent's security and compliance specialists can provide a wide range of online and onsite services such as vulnerability assessments, stealth penetration testing, disaster recovery preparedness, and endpoint active security monitoring and ransomware defense with SentinelOne technology.

Contact Progent for Ekahau Wi-Fi Technology Services
To find out more about Progent's consulting services for remote Ekahau wireless predictive design and onsite wireless site surveys, call 1-800-993-9400 or visit Contact Progent.