There is nothing that brings a workplace to a screeching stop like slow internet, or worse, an internet outage. Wi-Fi routers by default face a growing demand to support more staff and guests, and that can put a great amount of stress on these devices. The good thing is, today’s routers by design are built to support a great number of connecting devices with fast and stable internet service, but not if the Wi-Fi was not configured or deployed correctly.
One of the biggest problems companies face when scaling Wi-Fi is a sudden drop in the Internet speed which more often than not traces back to problematic or inefficient Wi-Fi setup. Setting up Wi-Fi in the office is a lot different from setting up Wi-Fi at home where the number of supported devices doesn’t change all the time. So it’s important to get the basics of Wi-Fi right before building out a network at enterprise level.
There are many great resources on the Internet that can help with that. “Getting Started in Wi-Fi” by Scott McDermott is one of them. In a short article, Scott McDermott, network engineer and Field Day delegate of many years, puts together a list of certifications that he himself teaches and podcasts and tutorials that make great materials to refer to when starting with Wi-Fi. Giving a brief description of each resource on the list, he takes the readers through the options. He writes,
A lot of people think Wi-Fi is easy. You plug in a router with Wi-Fi built-in at home, plug it in, and it just works. Most of the time. Why does it have to be so hard in the enterprise? Like many things IT, it’s really about scale and understanding the fundamentals. Wi-Fi is very forgiving and often works reasonably well when deployed poorly, but once usage ramps up the problems start. Perhaps a new device comes out and things suddenly don’t work well for that device. So, to help people start to learn to properly deploy Wi-Fi and understand the fundamentals, I’m going to recommend some resources to help you get going!
Read the rest of Scott’s article – “Getting Started in Wi-Fi” to understand what kind of resources you want to look at for your Wi-Fi requirements.
