Wireless Consulting Expertise

Ekahau has developed a comprehensive suite of software tools, compact RF scanning hardware, and collaboration services that allow organizations of any size to design, verify, tune, manage, and troubleshoot Wi-Fi deployments. Progent's certified Ekahau consultants can assist your company to use Ekahau products to perform any stage of Wi-Fi design and maintenance. Services offered by Progent's Wi-Fi experts include:

• Define the RF characteristics of your target environment: (floor plan, construction materials, ceiling height, generators of radio frequency interference, etc.)
• Determine your present and future needs for Wi-Fi coverage, workloads, and throughput
• Generate a model deployment for Wi-Fi access point (AP) types, antenna alternatives, placement, heights, and configuration
• Design a secondary coverage plan to enhance roaming and high availability
• On-premises signal strength measurement and validation of your actual Wi-Fi deployment
• Onsite detection of radio noise from sources independent of your Wi-Fi network
• Create a channel strategy that minimizes shared-channel contention and adjacent channel interference
• Centrally monitor and manage single or multiple Wi-Fi sites
• Provide actionable reports on Wi-Fi health analytics and issues
• Debug existing issues and take care of looming ones before they disrupt your Wi-Fi network
• Adapt your Wi-Fi solution cost effectively over time to continue meeting your evolving requirements

Progent also provides onsite assistance for carrying out Wi-Fi network surveys with the help of Ekahau's Sidekick RF analyzer to verify real performance and to identify low-signal spots, RF congestion, and other problems.

Ekahau's Products for Wi-Fi Network Design and Support
Ekahau Connect is a suite of applications, hardware, and services from Ekahau for designing and managing modern Wi-Fi networks. Used by most Fortune 500 businesses, Ekahau's Wi-Fi products are available by subscription as an integrated bundle. Some components of Ekahau Connect are also available separately. Progent can use the Ekahau stack to design, validate and troubleshoot your Wi-Fi network or help you to use your own Ekahau products.

Major pieces of the Ekahau Connect product family include:

Ekahau Pro
Ekahau Pro software enables you to plan, validate and troubleshoot Wi-Fi networks. To build a predictive model of your site, you draw a floor plan of your building. You then draw walls or read them into Ekahau Pro from a CAD file. You include doors, cable conduits, stairwells, and elevator shafts and list building materials. You then select various Wi-Fi AP models from Ekahau Pro's built-in database, which includes coverage characteristics and antenna patterns related to your APs. Ekahau Pro's 3-D modeling lets you add or remove APs to create a heat map of wireless coverage. You can instantly change access pints model, location, height and antenna options until the predictive model displays the coverage you want.

Ekahau Sidekick
After your predictive model is completed and your APs are in place and set up, you can test your system by performing an on-premises survey with the Ekahau Sidekick, a compact RF scanning device that integrates with Ekahau Pro. This lets you measure actual Wi-Fi coverage so you can tweak your AP deployment as necessary. Sidekick's built-in spectrum analyzer can detect locations experiencing interference from sources unassociated with your Wi-Fi network and Ekahau Pro can display these problem areas on your screen map so you can resolve the issues.

Ekahau Sidekick 2
The Ekahau Sidekick 2 mobile scanner introduces the capability to test and measure the latest 6 GHz Wi-Fi networks (Wi-Fi 6E) as well as traditional 5 GHz and 2.4 GHz environments. Speed is enhanced with four tri-band radios plus a spectrum analyzer capable of scanning at 50 sweeps/second. In comparison to the previous Sidekick scanner, Sidekick 2 delivers nearly double the performance for dual-band surveys and is 33% quicker at surveying tri-band Wi-Fi networks. Nine integrated 3D antennas deliver omnidirectional measurement repeatability and virtually do away with discrepancies between Sidekick 2 scanners. A fast-charge battery is good for two working days on a typical W-Fi site survey with just one charge.

Ekahau Analyzer
Ekahau Analyzer software integrates with the Sidekick signal scanner and displays the results of critical health recordings of a Wi-Fi network. To assist you to debug RF interference sources, the Analyzer software tests against your specific requirements and uses prominent pass/fail indicators to highlight results. Whenever an issue is flagged, you can use the Sidekick's portable spectrum analyzer to hone in on causes of RF interference or overcrowded channels. Capabilities of Ekahau Analyzer include Auto-Test, Signal Strength Analysis, Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) Analysis, Channel Quality Analysis, and Spectrum Measurements. Results can be displayed on a mobile Android or iOS phone or tablet connected to your portable Sidekick scanner, facilitating the acquisition of diagnostic measurements.

Ekahau Insights
Ekahau Insights software offers centralized monitoring of Wi-Fi network health across multiple Wi-Fi deployments around the globe. Insight allows you to search and sort predictive planning and Wi-Fi site survey projects, rank projects according to network health, manage an inventory of operating APs organized by locality and age of technology, and track survey activity to make sure you validate your Wi-Fi venues regularly. Automated analysis reports how your Wi-Fi deployments perform in comparison to your goals by network, floor, and area within a specific floor. A heatmap viewer provides graphic renditions for primary and secondary signal quality, channel congestion, SNR, and additional Wi-Fi network health issues. Support for tags streamlines file and workflow management by permitting you to store and search Wi-Fi projects by client, site type, workflow status, and other contextual groupings.

Ekahau Capture
Ekahau Capture software works in conjunction with the Ekahau Sidekick signal scanner to collect Wi-Fi packets in order to help experts to fix challenging network problems. Packet capture may be necessary to debug problems in areas such as connectivity, roaming between APs, poor audio, dropped calls, uneven channel utilization, outdated or faulty Wi-Fi software drivers, hardware failure, improperly configured APs, outdated devices, or security threats like unencrypted traffic or denial of Service (DoS) attacks. You can also utilize Ekahau Capture software to calculate Wi-Fi traffic statistics including retry rates, average throughput, and frame class distribution. Ekahau Capture stores packet captures in the PCAP file format so you can analyze them with third-party tools. Ekahau Capture can collect and save 802.11/a/b/g/n/ac frames and execute captures on a single channel or on multiple Wi-Fi channels.

Progent's Predictive Wi-Fi Modeling Services
Progent's predictive wireless planning services can be carried out remotely and utilize Ekahau's cutting-edge RF modeling and analysis products to plan a cost-effective Wi-Fi LAN. With predictive design, you provide Progent's Wi-Fi professionals your building's floor plans and a description of your environment such as walls, doors, cabling, stairways, and fabrication materials. You also specify your coverage, capacity, and performance requirements as well as your constraints. In addition, you estimate the types of endpoints your clients will operate, the apps they will use, and the maximum wireless traffic they will generate. Progent will use your input to build a digital simulation of your environment and develop a design that details the preferred vendors for your APs and controllers, the recommended number of APs, their optimal location and antenna selection, their proper configuration and power settings and their anticipated performance.

Progent's On-premises Wi-Fi Site Survey
Progent's onsite wireless survey uses Ekahau's purpose-built Wi-Fi signal collection instrument and associated software to help you to validate, optimize, and debug an existing Wi-Fi deployment. This is commonly undertaken immediately after a fresh deployment or used as a diagnostic tool to scale, optimize, or troubleshoot a mature wireless network. Offered across the U.S., Progent's onsite wireless survey services feature walkthrough measuring for radio frequency coverage and contention, checking for access point overpopulation, RF propagation tracking, data protection auditing, and selection of the best locations for customer-requested Wi-Fi Access Points.

Progent can deliver online and on-premises guidance for a wide selection of wireless access points and offer support that include Aironet Wi-Fi access point integration, Cisco Meraki wireless access point cloud management, Cisco Small Business 100/300/500 wireless access point consulting, Cisco Catalyst Wi-Fi AP deployment planning, Ubiquiti UniFi wireless access point configuration, and Apple AirPort wireless AP installation. Progent's onsite survey includes interviews with your IT management to determine target functionality for the Wi-Fi network. Progent's RCCD and Ekahau certified Wi-Fi site survey engineers can propose affordable Wi-Fi network enhancements that incorporate modern Wi-Fi technology and deliver top business value.

Progent can provide expertise for building a modern Bring Your Own Device wireless network by providing services like iPhone and iPad integration, and Android phone and tablet consulting. Apple iPhones and tablets, Androids, Windows Phones, and other handheld endpoints can present user density challenges and may also cause transmission power mismatches that call for careful setup for APs. Progent's Wi-Fi site survey provides the information necessary to address these issues and build an affordable and effective BYOD ecosystem.

Deliverables for Progent's predictive and onsite wireless site surveys can include:

• Radio Wi-Fi Spectrum Analysis including detection of RF issues related to your facility's layout, physical structure, and other possible sources of RF interference so you can foresee and mitigate problems during the Wi-Fi network design phase.
• RF Coverage Maps in the form of color RF contour images for the areas requiring coverage to help you to select the most efficient quantity and position of wireless access points and identify likely signal leakage zones and holes in coverage
• Capacity Plan for specifying and providing the bandwidth required to accommodate all apps and clients
• Cable Paths indicated as line diagrams you can supply to cabling contractors
• Device Installation guidance on where and how to deploy Wi-Fi devices plus description of special equipment that may be required (NEMA enclosures, antennas, etc.)
• Infrastructure Requirements to specify all facility and networking resources necessary to service the Wi-Fi environment like available switch ports, Power over Ethernet, electrical, and rack space

Advanced Network Infrastructure Expertise
Progent maintains one of the largest teams of certified Cisco CCIE network infrastructure consultants of any independent IT support company in the country. and can help you to integrate your Wi-Fi LAN seamlessly into your wired network. Progent can assist your company to deploy and manage Cisco routers, switches, and security appliances as well as Cisco Mobility products including Wi-Fi access points and Wi-Fi LAN controllers. Progent also can provide expertise with networking products from Juniper, Apple, WatchGuard, and other top vendors. To learn more about Progent's remote and onsite consulting services for Cisco wireless technology, refer to consulting and debugging support for Cisco Wi-Fi products.

To assist you with company-wide cybersecurity issues, Progent can provide the services of network security consultants who have earned advanced certifications from CISA, CISSP-ISSAP, CRISC and other recognized data security authorities. Progent's cybersecurity specialists can provide a wide range of online and on-premises services that include vulnerability audits, 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 expertise for remote Ekahau wireless predictive design and on-premises Wi-Fi surveys, call 1-800-993-9400 or visit Contact Progent.