Perket Technologies Wireless Planning and Design

Wireless Planning and Design

Installing a robust and reliable wireless network begins with a good solid design. A poorly designed network will suffer from coverage holes, poor service areas, slow response, poor voice quality, dropped calls, and inadequate capacity. These challenges can be eliminated with an efficient design leveraging Perket Technologies skilled staff. Leveraging patented technology from Motorola LANPlanner, this powerful software application and our years of experience enables customers to efficiently and effectively plan, track, display and document their wireless network infrastructure.

So you are thinking about deploying your first WLAN throughout your enterprise. All your competitors are doing it, the vendors are pushing it and the large service providers are selling it. The return on investment has proven out and it seems like everyone is considering doing something with wireless.

There is a good reason for all of this, wireless makes sense! There are a hundred good reasons for at least evaluating the capabilities and advantages a wireless solution can bring to your environment. Chances are your users will start demanding wireless capabilities, if they haven't already. If you get behind this eight ball, you will have a hard time catching up so you might as well start planning now.

First thing we want to do is to figure out what you need this WLAN solution to provide. What are the features and functionality you require or wish it to deliver? The WLAN should be capable of supporting both current and future (sometimes undefined) services. Secondly, we want to look at what IT services you are delivering today over the wired infrastructure. This requires that we to take a deep look at the current applications and services as well as the infrastructure used to deliver them.

When planning on WLAN technology insertion, many folks focus on the new capabilities and sometimes forget about what the old network provided. A perfect example is security. Security is one aspect that is easily forgotten because, for the most part, the connection from the PC to the network is assumed secure in a wired environment. When is the last time someone required IPSec from the NIC card to the LAN port? Just wasn't needed.

Once we understand what your actual needs are, we then can move towards the development of an optimal solution. The requirements definition and current state assessment are the most often overlooked aspects to WLAN planning. Many, many people skip this initial discovery and analysis phase and immediately begin asking vendors for solutions or start developing solutions only to find out later that they did not possess all of the requirements or consider the current environment.

Armed with the information above, the next step is to evaluate the vendors. You will have your list of requirements, you know what you need the WLAN vendor solution to provide, you just need information regarding the vendors’ capabilities.

Evaluate on the following at a minimum:

Ability to provide support for both current and future application services

Ability to integrate into the current environment

Ability to scale to meet current and future demand

Ease of Management

Cost Effectiveness and Reliability

These requirements must be met at a minimum. These are the KEY areas to evaluate to ensure that the chosen solution is the right solution. If the solution chosen does not provide the above features, it should be eliminated. You will find that we at Perket Technologies have already seen many vendors and can offer you the best of breed solutions that only Bluesocket can offer. Here is a little bit about Bluesocket.

BlueSecure™ Wireless Network Solutions from Bluesocket®

Bluesocket is the leader in open wireless network, security and management solutions that simplify the complexities of mobile enterprises. Bluesocket award-winning solutions are deployed in more than 47 countries worldwide. More than seventeen hundred educational, corporate and government institutions, including Harvard University, Honeywell, Toyota, and Parker Hannifin have all "Bluesocketed" their WiFi wireless local area networks (WLANs) in order to make them more secure and better managed.

BlueSecure Controller Family

Bluesocket’s end-to-end wireless local area network (WLAN) solution set features the award-winning BlueSecure™ Controller, a scalable WLAN Controller that supports enterprise WLAN deployments from the network edge to the core. BlueSecure Controllers provide an open, multi-vendor solution that integrates easily into existing infrastructure; seamless Layer 3 roaming with Bluesocket’s patent-pending Secure Mobility® technology; flexible policy enforcement; universal WLAN authentication for diverse users/devices; strong data encryption; intrusion detection and worm protection, with integrated client scanning for endpoint security; and VoIP support via advanced QoS and bandwidth management features.

BlueSecure Access Points

Bluesocket's BlueSecure Access Points (APs) are next-generation, "thin" access points that work in conjunction with BlueSecure Controllers for enterprise WLAN deployments. BlueSecure Access Points feature dual radios supporting 802.11a/b/g in a plenum-rated housing with fixed omni-directional antennas (Model AP-1500) and optional external antennas (Model AP-1540). Bluesocket’s enterprise-class MIMO AP (Model AP-1700) integrates a sophisticated six-antenna array that combines multiple signal paths to provide significantly up to 30% better in-building 802.11 a/b/g wireless coverage and performance today while being fully field-upgradeable for 802.11n compatibility tomorrow. BlueSecure APs are completely plug-and-play, requiring no manual configuration. Bluesocket’s DynamicRF™ technology automatically adjusts AP power and channel settings, and provides RF coverage hole detection and self-healing coverage for AP failures, thereby ensuring interference-free communication.

BlueSecure Intrusion Protection System

BlueSecure Intrusion Protection System (IPS) is an economical way to deploy RF-based monitoring and analysis for your WLANs. BlueSecure IPS protects the enterprise from all types of rogue devices including access points, rogue clients, neighboring WLANs, peer-to-peer (ad hoc) networks, and software APs as they appear. Not only can BlueSecure IPS alert you to potential WLAN threats, it can also actively contain or block threatening rogue devices. Bluesocket offers three versions of its RF IPS systems; a stand-alone configuration comprised of a Windows–based server with distributed RF sensors, a centralized RF sensor that ties directly into the BlueView™ Management System, and RF IDS provided at the network edge by BlueSecure Access Points. All three architectures provide a complete security monitoring solution that protects your information assets from current and emerging wireless threats.

BlueView™ Management System

BlueView Management System simplifies WLAN management by providing true centralized configuration and maintenance, policy-management, and monitoring capabilities for your WLAN Infrastructure. BlueView’s powerful scheduling tool enables you to automate BlueSecure Controller and Access Point maintenance and provisioning tasks such as backing up and restoring configurations, pushing out policy or configuration changes, upgrading system software, and installing software patches or new WLAN deployments. Dashboard views give administrators complete system status of BlueSecure Controllers and Access Points enabling a quick response to any issue that may arise.