Getting the most out of your wireless LAN

Businesses often don’t realise that to make the most of their connectivity they need to make sure that they have adequate Wi-Fi hardware in place. This is why even those businesses which clearly take their technology seriously and have invested in things like the correct bandwidth to grow, have Wi-Fi blackspots. Maybe a quick walk across the office with their laptop will see an employee drop their connection, or they can’t check their email in the outdoor spaces, or receive a decent download speed in half of their existing private offices. It’s not true Wi-Fi if it doesn’t work everywhere, and employees are still tied to one area of the building to get the best out of it.

Often, this problem isn’t due to a lack of budget or effort – just that the office’s Wi-Fi infrastructure hasn’t been well planned and organised. Or maybe it was originally, but with a bit of a reshuffle or an increase in employee numbers, it isn’t anymore.

Wi-Fi capabilities cover a wide spectrum and nowadays at the high-spec end, can support businesses to do some really amazing things. It’s not a coincidence that large retailers offer Wi-Fi. They brand their splash page to offer it to customers and then meticulously design their shops around the data that they collect with it. From capturing information on the areas that you dwell in or revisit, merged with past purchases and buyer behaviours, they start to put together your buyer persona for targeted marketing. Once you are using their Wi-Fi and have agreed to their terms and conditions, it’s quite easy for them to see for example that you searched for a price comparison and left the shop without a purchase. This prompts them to send you an email offering you a cheaper price or deal later, armed with the information that cost may be your primary concern.

Same for event spaces, where organisers can use Wi-Fi analysis to establish the most popular areas to exhibit or demo their products.

But back to office spaces, in order to make sure that you get the most out of your connectivity, you need the right Wi-Fi access points dependent on area, users, applications, and set up of physical space.

To benefit from a true Wi-Fi solution, it needs to be tailormade to your office, your floor plan, how many employees you have and how you want those employees to be able to work.

Customers can invest in the right connectivity solution but with the wrong wireless access points are not going to get the performance they are expecting. They are paying for a certain amount of bandwidth and anticipating what each of their employees will get, but sadly, they bought the car but not the tyres.

The good news is it’s easy to deploy access points, particularly if you do so with the help of specialists to get an idea of affordability and budget. At Optimity, we often do Wi-Fi audits for our new customers so that we can make sure they are getting the most bang for their buck and everything makes sense with regards to upload and downloads speeds. This provides the ability for everyone in your office to work at the same speed or alternatively, prioritise the most important traffic. We’ve got lots of clever tools to see how much coverage you get and to make sure that we've got the access points in the right place. We can also make sure that you have gigabyte compatible access points.

Something else that we’d like businesses to know is that if they are going to have a Wi-Fi solution, they really also need to make sure that they have good security. That means having a firewall in place. There are a few solutions which really are dependent on each other for businesses to get the most out of each of them and connectivity, Wi-Fi and security is one such group. If any of this doesn’t make sense, get in touch and we can advise you on making the most of your connectivity and your budget, while staying secure and online.