7 Signal

Wireless Monitoring Solutions

7Signal is an industry leader in monitoring and troubleshooting wireless issues from locations such as your office, your warehouse/factory and now even from the homes of your remote workers. With two different monitoring technologies you can get a complete view of:

• How the wireless network is operating in your work spaces?
• How your devices are actually seeing and interpreting the wireless?

Sapphire Eye – Monitor your wireless environment

Once you’ve set up your wireless network, most people think its just there and never changes, but experience teaches us that’s not the case! From offices to warehouses the wireless environment can be altered by things as diverse as:

• Stock levels
• Office moves
• Where large groups of people meet
• The wireless upstairs/downstairs
• High utilization on one AP having a knock-on effect
• Channel interference
• Third party interference

Sapphire Eye is a series of sensors that continuously monitor the state of your wireless environment, forming a picture of what’s happening over time and how your wireless services are being affected. This allows you to adapt to those within your control. Or plan around those out of your control that are having a negative impact on your environment.

Mobile Eye – How your devices see the wireless

A big challenge with wireless is that different devices see the same wireless coverage in completely different ways. This is a combination of the type and sensitivity of the antenna, and also the way their wireless drivers are written. All the wireless surveys in the world can’t show you how every device actually interprets your coverage, so it can involve a little guess work. Unless you have Mobile Eye! Mobile Eye is a software agent which looks at a device’s wireless card and drivers to establish what numbers they are actually seeing. This information is then recorded in a Cloud account, showing an overview of all your devices and the differences between them. Which helps you to understanding why they see and therefore behave differently. This information is key to adjusting your wireless network in the right way for the devices that are using it, and not in the way you may think devices should behave.

How 7Signal can support your office wireless

Office environments can be big open spaces, or long corridors of meeting rooms and kitchens, but each has its challenges for wireless. The big open spaces should be easy, but experience has shown that devices get easily confused by seeing too many Access Points and not connecting to the ones you expect. Sapphire Eye can help monitor these spaces and show you when interference from other wireless networks, or your own network, becomes an issue. Some modern devices are now starting to take the utilization of the wireless AP into consideration before they decide where to roam to next, information you can’t easy see when working out why things aren’t operating the way you expect them to. Mobile eye can help you understand why the end device isn’t connected to the local AP and prefers the one at the other end of the office instead. The network may (or may not) be perfectly designed but the drivers on the user device actually decide where they are going to connect too and the numbers they see will dictate that. Mobile eye gathers that information and allows you to see why they behave the way they do. One of the greatest issues in troubleshooting any IT issue is the phone never rings before the problem occurs, so you need to have the ability to look back a few minutes or hours. With Sapphire Eye, the information about the state of your network is stored 24/7 – hence you can look back at the issue and see what changed. With this monitoring over time you can also pick out the patterns in behaviour that affect your network.

How 7Signal can support your warehouse and factory environments

These areas can be very difficult to wireless effectively; stock levels impact coverage, machinery can cause interference and the APs can be a long way away from the devices that are trying to use them. Sapphire eye can monitor the changes in the environment as work takes place in these spaces. Monitoring changes in signal strength, noise and traffic levels as the days and weeks go by, shows you how your wireless is being influenced, and if changes are made, measuring the impact this has on your wireless. The ability to record over time means you can see the impact of stock layout, factory processes and shift patterns and whether these are directly or indirectly impacting the IT performance. Mobile eye works with your end devices and records their view of the wireless on the shop floor, whether this is scanning stock levels or inputting production numbers into a tablet or laptop. These devices all vary in the way they detect wireless and also in the way they respond to wireless, hence its perfectly possible for two devices side by side to be connected to two different APs. The question is why, hence using Mobile eye to gather this information from both devices directly allows you to understand this better.

How 7Signal can support your Home and Mobile Workers

Work place habits are changing all the time and people expect to be able to access their key systems from anywhere. Security issues to one side, another problem is the lack of control you have over the first few hops of their connection, namely the local wireless and the local internet hop. Mobile eye can quickly and remotely tell you how good the local connection is and how hard that PC is working to make the connection at a decent speed. All the issues that the users are blaming on your IT can be explained by intermittent or poor connection issues if you have access to the right data. You might need to get them to move their router a bit or buy an extender, but at least you’ll have the data to help. What ever your wireless needs, Full Control Networks has a range of products and professional services to help you get the most from your wireless. Why not arrange a demo of 7Signal to learn more?

For any questions, please call us now on 01677 428700 or email info@fullcontrolnetworks.co.uk, alternatively you can see it on 7Signal’s website.