AirMagnet Redefines the Wireless Site Survey
AirMagnet Inc., the leader in wireless network assurance, released AirMagnet Planner, the most significant enhancement ever to the AirMagnet Survey product line. AirMagnet Planner is a RF planning and wireless LAN design solution that offers unrivaled cost advantages and ease of use. This new solution is available as a stand-alone product or as a fully integrated option for the newly released AirMagnet Survey 4.0.
The AirMagnet Planner enables enterprises to design indoor wi-fi networks using predictive maps that analyze wi-fi performance and interference based on the building's architectural environment and material structures, such as walls, cubicles and obstructions. The integrated AirMagnet Planner and Survey 4.0 solution not only predicts the ideal quantity, placement and configuration of access point (APs), but also validate those settings in a live RF environment using active end-user performance metrics, such as actual connection speed and packet metrics. No other solution combines state-of-the-art predictive modeling with real-world performance data.
"No matter what method is used to predict how RF signals and APs will behave, the real-world wi-fi environment will always surprise you," said Greg Yates, executive vice president of AirMagnet. "Other RF-design and site-planning solutions on the market today rely solely on predictive analysis--they don't offer a way to test end-user performance once the site is deployed--which is why they have so many sophisticated, time-consuming components to configure. AirMagnet simplifies the design phase for end users by offering all the critical features to plan sufficiently and then tweak accordingly."
Corporate campuses with numerous buildings of similar structure and layout can use AirMagnet Planner and Survey to create an ideal network design based on real-world results from a single building. "The AirMagnet Planner enables our end-user customers to both predict and actualize the performance of their wireless LANs, which enables them to deploy or expand their infrastructure more rapidly," said Damian Shonko, vice president of mobility solutions at Denali Advanced Integrations. "We're excited that AirMagnet continues to deliver solutions that add value to enterprise-wide wi-fi deployments."
The new Survey 4.0 release offers other key enhancements, including an integration with Google Earth to enhance outdoor wi-fi site surveys. Users can overlay Survey results onto Google Earth maps to pinpoint areas of interference and noise, while taking advantage of Google Earth's GPS accuracy and flexibility to zoom in to any level of detail. This makes AirMagnet Survey uniquely suited for city-wide wi-fi networks--like in Mountain View, Calif., where Google is creating a municipal wireless network covering the entire city and delivering free Internet access to residents and visitors--which increasingly require scientific outdoor site planning and surveying.
Additional new features of AirMagnet Survey 4.0 include:
- Spectrum Interference Alarms and Analysis take Survey's integration with Spectrum Analyzer a step further by providing alarms when spectral interference is detected and identifying specific sources of interference, enabling surveyors to account for interference at the planning stage, before it affects network performance.
- Roaming Control makes AirMagnet's unique method of active surveying even more active, by allowing the user to set a standard roam rate during a site survey to more accurately recreate the true end-user experience, rather than base planning on the signal strength, connection speed and number of packet retries experienced by a single wireless machine.
- Integration with AirMagnet Laptop Analyzer enables site surveys conducted using Laptop Analyzer's survey tool to be imported into Survey. Field agents armed with Laptop Analyzer can use it to conduct live surveys and send them back to Survey at a central location for further analysis.
Additional new features of AirMagnet Planner include:
- Access Point Overlap shows on the map display where APs on the same channel overlap above a user-defined threshold. Users can also investigate an AP in detail to plot the total combined interference to a particular access point from all other APs.
- Advanced Network Simulation provides full control of the proposed wireless infrastructure. Users can add APs to any location and experiment to find the ideal AP placement for the environment with independent settings for both 802.11a and 802.11b/g radios. Users can predict performance based on changes to the AP channel, IP address, transmit power, antenna type, orientation and height.
- Predicted wi-fi Environment Report and Bill of Materials can be automatically generated upon completion of the site survey. The report outlines the predicted wi-fi landscape, including areas of dead spots and interference, how many APs to deploy and how to configure APs for optimal coverage and performance.
Reproduced from an article published by BusinessWire
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