WiFi Survey

Survey Examples

Below are some examples of WiFi surveys.

Lanesborough Hotel

Claridges Hotel

Waterloo Station

WiFi Survey Service

XWLAN over the last 3 years have carried out wireless surveys for many varied clients including Yachting Marinas, Railway Stations, Hotels, and office buildings. There are two main purposes to survey an area for WiFi activity. A pre-installation survey will determine WiFi activity and specific channel useage of the proposed site prior to installing the client WLAN. A post-installation survey will determine the coverage of the WLAN and potential areas of interference and noise from incumbent systems in the vicinity. These details allow fine tuning of the configuration of the client APs giving the maximum performance available for the given site. Areas of poor coverage can be determined and re-placement of APs or additional hardware can be employed to compensate accordingly.

In the scenario of train stations where there can be many incumbent WLANs finding a free channel to set your APs can be found after a pre-installation survey. In an office environment after a WLAN installation a row of steel filing cabinets can play havoc with the signal from an AP and re-placement at a higher elevation may be required to literally jump over the obstacle. Directional antennas can also be employed to ‘push’ the signal into areas where they may be weak using standard omni-directional antennas.

Security of a WLAN is crucial and a high quality comprehensive survey by XWLAN will uncover rogue access points and potential points of entry for ‘piggybackers’. This type of survey can form part of a security audit of security conscious IT implementations.

Where a client wishes to examine the feasibility of implementing a WLAN a potential site can be populated with test APs configured to behave as in a permanent installation. The subsequent signal propagation can be reviewed to assess the penetration of signal and give an accurate indication of the performance that could be expected from the proposed WLAN. The test APs can be moved during the survey to indicate the effect that different numbers and positioning of APs can have on the performance.