The Problem
In addition to 5 hospitals, the healthcare provider has more than 100 physician’s offices, outpatient clinics and imaging centers. All these facilities are networked, and the staff in them rely heavily on Wi-Fi in order to function effectively. Astonishingly, the entire network at all these facilities is run by only five network engineers and one wireless engineer.
The hospital uses a cisco infrastructure end to end, and the Wi-Fi network comprises 11 pairs of cisco 5508 controllers and more than 2,200 access points. On a daily basis the Wi-Fi network averages 6,000 active clients.
In the past, on-staff engineers have always relied on popular tools such as Ekahau Site Survey Pro, air Magnet and Omnipeek to aid network planning and troubleshooting. but as the use cases became more varied, the engineers began to find these tools lacking when confronted with a series of elusive client-related problems.
The nursing staff were reporting intermittent roaming problems with some of their workstations on wheels (WoWs) and bad call experiences on VoiP devices they depended on every day. The engineers could not pinpoint the problem with current tools.
Troubleshooting intermittent Wi-Fi client issues is difficult at the best of times. With limited Wi-Fi staff, the team simply did not have the time to investigate every incident, nor sit in front of a cisco Prime management console all day, hoping to spot a glitch as it occurs!
Frustrated by his time constraints and the limitations of existing tools, the senior wireless engineer realized he needed something more sophisticated, that could do unattended active monitoring and analysis of the Wi-Fi experience from the client perspective. User complaints like “the Wi-Fi sucks” are no help at all. but the details you need, like when and where, and what the user was doing, are as elusive as the problem itself. “I needed a Wi-Fi monitoring solution that could do what I can’t – literally follow a device around, and capture performance samples everywhere it goes,” said the senior wireless engineer. The engineer turned to 7SIGNAL for a solution.