You need an Ekahau Sidekick for great Wi-Fi. Does your boss know?
Wi-Fi is everywhere. It’s in the mission-critical technologies that power businesses of every shape and size. It’s in the life-sustaining medical devices we rely on for health and wellness. It keeps us connected when we need to communicate and it gives us an escape when we need to isolate. If your business relies on Wi-Fi, you need the measurement accuracy of the Ekahau Sidekick to help you troubleshoot and optimize your wireless network. If you’re still stuck on Wi-Fi adapters and dongles, you’re likely wasting time, money, and risking your reputation.
Ready to upgrade but need help convincing your boss? We’ve drafted a manager request template to get you started.
What causes bad Wi-Fi?
The plug-and-play auto-optimizations marketed by your favorite Access Point (AP) manufacturers aren’t all the same. The complexities of an increased shift in demand overnight due to a software update, latency-sensitive services like voice over Wi-Fi, and real-time location services turn a simple plug-and-play solution into a custom deployment that needs proper planning and regular maintenance. Bad Wi-Fi can be a result of insufficient coverage, but it can also be caused by a range of improper settings and external interferers that APs alone may not be able to detect.
- Coverage and Capacity – If your network doesn’t meet the minimum requirements for coverage and capacity, the devices on your network will not be able to perform the necessary applications.
- Channel Overlap – Channel overlap can wreak havoc on your network. Interferences from neighboring APs and networks will cause bad Wi-Fi.
- Interference – Both Wi-Fi and non Wi-Fi signals can cause interferences on your network. Wireless cameras, microphones, or even microwaves can cause a disruption on your network.
The Real Cost of Bad Wi-Fi in 2020
Gartner has somewhat famously estimated the cost of a single minute of downtime for a large organization to be around $5,600, or a little more than $330,000/hr. And while a full outage may be attributable to more than just a bad Wi-Fi design, other costs like moves, adds, and changes to network infrastructure can average $500-$1,000 per drop in labor to remedy a bad design (and that doesn’t even include the cost of the additional AP if needed).
Bad Wi-Fi is more than just an inconvenience. If you deploy APs without proper planning, you’re left with coverage holes, roaming issues, inefficient use of spectrum, and channel overlap that leads to bad Wi-Fi -> a negative experience -> a loss of sale -> a bad review -> and a poor reputation. Here are some real-world issues we see resulting from bad Wi-Fi:
Retail – If your business uses an iPad or other wireless device at checkout, an outage can make it impossible to collect payment. And for every minute you and your customer wait to reestablish a connection, customer satisfaction drops and loyalty drops.
Hospitality – Hotels rely on return visits and brand loyalty from their customers. Even a single experience with a bad Wi-Fi network can tarnish your reputation for that customer and a bad review can have an exponential impact on future business.
Manufacturing – The impact of bad Wi-Fi can hit every stage of the supply chain. Production lines can go down if safety checks aren’t registered online and warehouses grind to a halt if inventory systems cant be accessed.
Education – Density becomes critical in lecture halls and classrooms with students accessing course materials and digital textbooks on multiple devices. If capacity fails, tech issues can get in the way of education and classes can fall behind schedule.
Enterprise – With so many employees using cloud-based apps, productivity and billable hours are heavily reliant on a business’s Wi-Fi functioning properly. It only takes one outage impacting executive conference calls to rack up thousands of dollars of lost productivity in salaries alone.
The Solution: Ekahau Sidekick
Ekahau Sidekick is an all-in-one Wi-Fi measurement device and spectrum analyzer designed to give you the accurate data you need to deploy high-performing networks to your specific requirements and diagnose and fix issues fast to minimize costly network downtime.
The Sidekick is a useful tool at every stage of the wireless network lifecycle from planning and validating to optimizing and troubleshooting. Wi-Fi isn’t “set it and forget it” and the Sidekick gives you visibility into network health and performance so you can continue to tune and optimize your WLAN based on real-world RF measurements.
Request for Sidekick: Manager Approval Letter Template
Look, we get it. Plenty of networks existed before the Sidekick and even we at Ekahau used to rely on Wi-Fi adapters to measure accuracy. But then things changed. Wi-Fi evolved from nice-to-have to mission-critical in almost every industry and we needed a solution that would treat it as such. If you’re stuck on outdated technology and you need a little help convincing your boss to make the investment, use this Request for Sidekick letter template to get the conversation started.
To:
From:
Re: Ekahau Sidekick Proposal
I am writing to request your approval to purchase an Ekahau Sidekick Wi-Fi measurement device.
According to Gartner, they estimate the cost of a single minute of downtime for a large organization at around $5,600, or a little more than $330,000/hr. And while a full outage may be attributable to more than just a bad Wi-Fi design, other costs like moves, adds, and changes to network infrastructure can average $500-$1,000 per drop in labor to remedy a bad design (and that doesn’t even include the cost of the additional AP if needed).
I’m estimating it will save us 5-10 hours of time per week in surveying and troubleshooting our Wi-Fi and result in far better network performance, minimizing costly downtime.
Benefits of Ekahau Sidekick:
- Increase in Productivity – Enables faster and safer site surveying by simplifying all of the equipment we used to need into a small form factor device with built-in battery that connects right to a mobile device.
- Faster Resolution – Uses the built-in spectrum analyzer to quickly detect and pinpoint interference from non-Wi-Fi sources impacting Wi-Fi performance (like microwave ovens, wireless video transmitters, etc.).
- Greater Accuracy and Reliability – Purpose-built measurement device achieves more precise measurement results over traditional USB Wi-Fi based adapter solutions.
- Enables Remote Collaboration – With this new solution, anyone can walk the survey and we can focus our efforts on interpreting the results and implementing fixes.
Here’s a quick video that explains the Sidekick in more detail. If you’d like more information about the Ekahau Sidekick, you can find it at www.ekahau.com/sidekick or I’d be glad to answer any questions.
The Ekahau Sidekick is $3,295 or included with Ekahau Connect for $7,495.
Thank you for considering my request. I look forward to your reply.
Regards,
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