The Solution

An initial meeting with the customer’s IT Manager and Systal’s WiFi specialists took place to understand the current issues around their network and what they were looking to achieve.

To address these issues one of Systal’s WiFi specialists designed and conducted a Wireless Active Measured Survey of both the customer’s HQ and bottling plant. The Active Measured survey ignores the current deployment completely and redesigns the signal propagation using a tripod with an Access Point (AP) mounted onto it to simulate a real wireless service set. During an active survey, the Systal Wi-Fi Toolset associates to a specific AP and exchanges data to emulate an end user. This allows surveyors to map out exactly how real-world clients will perform at various locations in terms of connection speed, retry rates, and packet loss.

A full in-depth report was then released to the customer providing our findings around their current networking issues, why these issues were occurring and our recommendations on how to resolve them.

Systal were also selected by the customer to implement these recommendations which involved a new RF template, roaming and configuration settings along with the movement of existing AP’s and the installation of new AP’s which would enable all users to connect to the Wi-Fi at similar speeds allowing consistency and resiliency.

Finally, following successful implementation, a Periodic/Post Survey was conducted to account for changes in the environment, interference sources, user behaviour, obstacle changes etc. Systal’s Wi-Fi Toolset’s Diff View feature allows side-by-side visualising of differences between two separate surveys. This helps show how a site’s wireless environment has changed over time. Users can visualise differences in signal coverage, interference levels, noise levels, speed, packet losses, frame retries etc. between two surveys.

The Results

Efficiency of the warehouse staff has increased due to the reduction in RF Gun connectivity issues. Office based employees are also experiencing less latency downtime and can focus on their task at hand without connectivity interruptions.
Connections to the corporate WiFi are now more stable with a reduction in latency due to implementing custom RF settings. Efficient wireless coverage was also achieved by observing hand- off points and relocating AP’s to maximize the roaming paths.
Now that the network is more secure and reliable the customer can begin to focus on their longer-term business strategy with their wireless network set up to support all the latest technology advancements.

Grant Mckay, Glenmorangie’s Infrastructure Team Lead, said “We used Systal to provide site survey and health assessments of our Wireless Infrastructure as we were experiencing coverage and roaming issues and I have to say this was money well spent.  They were quickly able to provide guidance and recommendations which addressed our issues as well as provide the engineering resources to support the required infrastructure changes.  I would definitely recommend.”